Twitter and How It’s Changing the World
by: Micheal Tasner

There is a pretty good chance you have heard of Twitter, as it has been mentioned on Good Morning America, CNBC and CNN. It was talked about all through the recent election, quoted in movies, and even on a variety of the current hit TV shows. Terms such as tweet and status update are now common language. What has really given Twitter the steam it needs to survive as a long-standing successful Web 3.0 company is the fact that it’s totally different than everything we’re used to. The norm has been search-engine friendly articles, long blog content and even longer press releases. The founders of Twitter (Evan Williams and Biz Stone) knew people were lacking time and getting frustrated with the status quo, so they decided to shake things up a bit. The shake up: No more long content allowed. Anything you want to say must be 140 characters or less. The result: People have been flocking to Twitter like there’s no tomorrow!

What is Twitter?

“Twitter is a service for friends, family and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

That is the definition provided by Twitter.com but it doesn’t do it justice. Twitter has outgrown the vision of the people who originated it, and it has become a place to find long-lost friends, connect with your favorite authors, build raving fans, get instant feedback, launch new products and build long-lasting relationships. You have the ends of the spectrum: social networking and micro-blogging. In other words you can have the social connection with people, but your able to do it with much smaller amounts of text. Obviously the use of Twitter easily scales past the idea of updating people on “what you are doing.”

On Twitter, there are three key terms you need to know: followers, following and tweets. Following are the people you personally are tracking and want to be kept up to date on. Followers are those people who want to be kept in the know of what you’re doing. Lastly, tweets are your updates broadcasted to your followers. These updates are strictly limited to 140 total characters. This makes it a micro-blog post.

Other Twitter Lingo You Need to be Aware of:

• Status: Your update to “what are you currently doing?”

• Direct Message: Conversations that are private between you and another user.

• @Tweets: Public responses to others’ tweets.

• Retweets: taking someone else’s message and broadcasting it to your followers

• TinyURL: A tool that shortens your long links automatically

• Tweeps: (for good measure) Your Twitter peeps.