The World’s A-Twitter

In the last few months, the word “Twitter” has been floating around my office – it seems everyone has an opinion about Twitter and most think it’s the must-have social media tool of the year. Which of these people have actually been on Twitter? None. How will our company use Twitter? I have no idea. And what can anybody really say in 140 characters or less? Beats me.

As more and more of my colleagues became “twitterpated” (to use the term from the Disney movie Bambi) with Twitter, I decided it was time to discover the site for myself. Until a few weeks ago, I’d never even been on Twitter. I didn’t know what a “tweet” was (I just knew it wasn’t called a “twit”) or that there was a limit to the amount of text you could write with each post. I knew I needed to join the site to see what is was about, but before I made the Twitter commitment, I wanted to research exactly what Twitter was and why everyone thought it was the latest and greatest social media tool.

Step One – My Twitter Research

According to the site, “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?” My first thought: who really cares what you’re doing every minute of every day? Well, according to Twitter, “even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends or colleagues – especially when they’re timely.” Maybe, maybe not. I guess it depends on what you’re tweeting. I’m hoping I’ll buy in to this philosophy once I’ve posted my first tweet.

What is Twitter really? A “microblog,” according to most blogs and articles I read. Like a traditional blog, Twitter allows users to post personal messages but in a miniscule fashion – 140 characters or less. The 140 characters counts everything you type – letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, even links. There’s no limit to the number of tweets you can post in a day, and each tweet is visible on your personal page. Tweets are also visible to your followers and to other Twitterati on the Twitter Public Timeline, which shows the tweets by all tweeters (unless you’ve opted out of this feature).

So, if you can tweet all day long are you constantly sitting in front of your computer and logged onto Twitter? Not necessarily. While you can tweet on the Twitter Web site, you can also post tweets via your iPhone or Blackberry, by texting from a cell phone or from a third-party Web site like TweetDeck.

Now that I have the basics covered, I guess it’s time to join Twitter and take the next step: becoming a first-time tweeter.

*Looking for definitions to Twitter terminology you’ve seen? Refer to the “twittonary” published by Shannon Yelland on sitemasher.