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To Tweet or not to Tweet

POSTED 3rd July 09, by Dan Williams.

Twitter, what is it all about and how can it help you?

Twitter is a free social networking service communicating through posting mini blogs. Users can send and receive posts or updates, which in Twitter's case are called Tweets, which consist of 140 characters.

These Tweets are then 'delivered' to anyone who has subscribed to their entries, these are called Followers. Tweets can be submitted through various media, the most common being through the Twitter website. However, with the improvement of mobile technology, users can now Tweet and upload images on the move through Internet Mobiles such as iPhones and Blackberrys. Tweets can also be submitted via SMS.

When I first heard about the popularity of Twitter I was amazed and impressed as to how fast it had grown. After a little, and admittedly easy, research, I found that Twitter was founded in 2006 by a company called Odeo. They originally came up with the name Twttr, this was along the lines of Flickr. This rapid growth over a short number of years is impressive for what is, let's face it, a very basic idea, let people know what you are doing.
I started to use Twitter as I thought I had better see what all of the fuss was about. At first I was not keen, having used sites like Facebook, which have a lot more to them and enable a lot more interaction with other users, I found it a little boring and far too basic.
However, when returning to Twitter after about 2 months of inactivity, I started following people who I thought may have something interesting to say, or at least in my opinion did!
I found some of the Tweets to be quite funny and interesting and I started to see why people liked it.

I'm not saying I'm a complete convert, I don't go home in the evening and rush to my iPhone to check my Twitter, I don't wake up in the night in a cold sweat panicking that I have no updated by Twitter to tell my Followeres that 'I am sleeping'. But I am starting to see the appeal, as a time to time, easy to read, pass some time kind of media it has it's plus points.

This is pretty much it for my Blog post, I'm now off to Tweet about it...

TAGS: FACEBOOK, TWITTER