What the heck is twitter?

Whether or not you know what Twitter is, I bet I have a few facts you didn't know. According to Wikipedia, Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables people to send and read messages up to 140 characters long. That's not much, but in todays fast moving world, many people don't have time to read much more. Like other social networks, you can follow and connect with people.

So what is twitter good for? There is no way I could list all uses. So I'll just mention a few. You can use Twitter to stay in touch with friends. The short messages called tweets are public. Anyone can read them on twitter.com. Twitter is one of the fastest ways to spread news. By using keywords called hash tags, tweets can be labeled. No list of uses would be complete without mentioning spam and marketing. Twitter has a lot of spam. But there are ways to avoid most spam. Twitter is very mobile. You can send twitter messages with your cell phone as well as from your home computer. With twitpics you can even send photos from your cell phone to twitter. News simply can not be reported faster than that!

Here are some interesting Twitter facts in no particular order:

• even Obama has a Twitter account

• women outnumber men on Twitter

• Brazil ranks 5^th in Twitter users despite not being English speaking

• More than half of Twitter users use something other than twitter.com to tweet, monitor and manage their tweeting

• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity

• 21% of users have never posted a tweet

• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day

• there are over 250 (and counting) twitter copycat websites

There are a lot of services out there to make using twitter easier. These services are either other websites that provide a different user interface for twitter or they are software to download and run on your computer. Some of those are free and some cost money. Some promise to add thousands of users to your follower list, others promise to make you thousands of dollars by tweeting affiliate links. Many of those automations will eventually result in your account being suspended. Twitter does not allow the use of software to automatically tweet or add/remove followers. Still, many people use such software.

There is a lot more to learn about Twitter that I can write in one article. Whether you are a new tweeple or an experienced twitter guru, the list of twitter uses and interesting twitter facts is endless. You can find a nice and free twitter online course on urlchef.com/twittercourse/ to continue to learn more about twitter and its uses.

Twitter is still evolving and will be around for a long time. No matter what you do online, I am sure there is a way you can use twitter to your advantage. Some universities even use twitter for research. What will you use twitter for?