A Twitter Overview - A Getting Started Guide
Overview
Overview
Twitter is a social networking site which encourages users to communicate information using 140 characters or less. Termed microblogging by some, users can express thoughts, feelings or news updates in these small messages called tweets. In order to see peoples tweets in real time, users can decide to follow the users which they find interesting.
Features
Twitter is one of the 50 top websites worldwide. It is incredibly easy to create an account all you need to do to sign up is to enter your email address, full name and a password.Indeed, a lot of Twitters users are older adults who may not have used social networking sites in the past, which may be a testament to how user friendly it is. You can either use Twitter directly through the website, or through your mobile phone. On your account homepage, Twitter asks you Whats happening? and you simply tap in whatever you like in the marked area below, and this is then shared with all of the people who are following your tweets.
As well as being able to share textual information and links on Twitter, the Twitpic image hosting site ensures that you can also easily tweet photos. This means that if something catches your eye when you are out and about, you can take a picture on your cell phone and utilise Twitpic to send it to Twitter. You can then share it with all of your followers in minutes.
Like most other social networking sites, Twitter allows you to privately send messages people you are connected to. You can use DM, or Direct Messaging to send a private message to a follower, which will come up in their Direct Messages box. Only the person who receives it can read this message.
However, Twitter is more than a social networking site it is an information network, where information around the globe can be shared quickly and simply. As Twitter has evolved, so too have the amount of opportunities for sharing information on the site. Now, you can share not only personal insights, but you can also retweet other peoples updates, which means simply passing on someone elses tweet to all of your followers. This way, information can spread very quickly across the Twitter network.
So as to see what people are tweeting about, hashtags have been introduced. By putting a # in front of a word or phrase in your tweet, you associate your tweet with a topic or theme. Anyone can then view global or countrywide trends of what people are tweeting about. So for example, I could tweet an opinion about the #UK election I could subsequently search the #UK election trend topic and see what other people have tweeted on the same topic.
Limitations
Obviously, the first limitation with Twitter is the fact that in each tweet you are limited to 140 characters. If you are someone who likes to write an essay about what you had for dinner last night, then perhaps Twitter is not suited to you! However, many people have said that they like the challenge of fitting what they want to say into a small amount of space and that it makes them consider more carefully about what they want to say.
Users are not limited by the number of times they can tweet. As such, sometimes your tweet stream can be filled with tweets from one overly enthusiastic Twitter user that you are following, which can be annoying. Often, the only solution to this is to stop following the offending person.
Twitter has also been accused of being a site where people share pointless information a lot of tweets can be very pointless or mundane, such as what someone had for supper. However, as they are restricted to 140 characters, you can skim-read these tweets very quickly, or simply decide not to take any notice of them at all!
Conclusion
Twitter is an extremely flexible social networking platform it can be very quick and simple to use or you can spend more time and do more complex things on it according to your needs. It is a place where you can bring many sources of manageable chunks of information together it is then up to you to decide what to do with these.
by: Mike Smith
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