What is Twitter?

It seems that almost everyone nowadays either has a Twitter account or is vehemetly against them. News organizations have them, companies and non-profits have them, famous and not-so-famous people have them, but what is Twitter and should you get an account as well?

Before you go and sign up for anything I always recommend reading up about it so you have a good understanding of what it is you're getting into. In this case, Twitter is another social networking site that lets you keep up with what people around you are doing, similar to Facebook, but each post is limited to 140 characters. Characters are things you type into the message, including spaces, punctuation, numbers and letters. For example, "I got 3 new hats!" is seventeen characters long.

This limitation keeps things short and sweet, allowing you read more, less detailed, information quicker. While everyone's Twitter habits are different, most people follow ("follow" is the Twitter version of Facebook's "friend" status.) a combination of the aforementioned "Twitterers". Much like Facebook, this makes it easy for information to travel quickly to many people. A humorous example of this was made by a web comic called XKCD. (Click here to see it.)

Practical Tip of the Day:
Just like Facebook, you want to look at the privacy settings in your Twitter account, especially if you're using your real name. If you don't have your privacy settings set up properly, everything you "tweet" will be viewable to the world and will come up if someone looks you up in Google.