Twitter: A Layman's Guide

So, no doubt you'll have noticed that Twitter is in the news a lot lately. Celebs and the web 2.0 set are signing up in droves and with all that increased publicity has come a definite surge of new people looking for an alternative to Facebook's increasingly cluttered world.

More people than ever are now answering that question that has come to mean so much over the past few years - what are you doing?

So, what is Twitter?
This is a bit of a tough one to nail down, it's been referred to as 'the SMS of the internet', a social networking site and a micro-blogging site. In reality, it is all of those things. It also functions as an interactive RSS feed, you can follow your favourite companies, newspapers and celebrities and keep up to date with all their news, new products or general ramblings.

At its most basic, Twitter can best be described as the 'status' bit of facebook displayed in a continually updated list. Posting a message on your page is known as 'tweeting' and tweets are limited to 140 characters each. The tweets of the people you are following appear on your feed (equivalent to Facebook's wall) and your tweets appear on the feeds of people following you.

Every tweet posted appears on the main feed, for all of Twitter's estimated five million users to see. It's worth bearing in mind that with five million people tweeting, the posts disappear from the communal feed pretty rapidly. If you choose, you can protect your updates so only people you approve can see (handy if your mum or boss is a Twitterholic).

It's a very VERY simple little setup but painfully addictive, especially because (thanks to smartphones) tweeting can be done via text message or specific applications for iPhones or Blackberrys.

What's with all the squiggles? @tag and #tags.
Depending just how into Twitter the people you follow are, you'll encounter a different amount of bewildering add-ons to their tweets. The most common of these is the @tag. This simply denotes that a single tweet is directed at one person. When mentioning someone on Twitter it seems to have become standard to replace their actual name with an @tag to their profile.

By using the @tags it becomes far easier to discern which tweets are aimed at you and which are just the general musings of your followers/followees. There's even a tab allowing you to view just the tweets with @tags directed at you. Be careful though, using too many @tags to have a instant messaging style conversation with one person can lead to you losing followers. If you want to have an extended conversation then it's probably best to just use the more private 'direct message' tab.

#tags are another simple but very useful part of the Twitter experience. When mentioning common subjects like Barack Obama or a particular gadget #tags are often used so it becomes easier to search for and find tweets that interest you. The sentence 'I can't believe Barack Obama is allowed to keep his blackberry' would become 'I can't believe #obama is to keep allowed his #blackberry. These tags make it easier to use Twitter's search function to find people talking about common topics.

#tags can also be tacked onto the start of tweets to show their subject. For example many people who tweet for large news companies such as CNN or BBC start their tweets with #news.

What about pictures and stuff?
We've all been using Facebook for ages now, we're used to quietly trawling through our friends' albums at lunchtime and giggling to ourselves at their drunken antics. On the surface, Twitter lacks these hilarious and embarrassing photos. However, some clever soul invented twitpic.com which allows you to upload a link to a picture hosted elsewhere. By using this service not only can you publish pictures of what you're up to but you can do it live, as it happens. Surely that's more appealing?

Admittedly the games, plug-ins, gifts, superpokes, pokes, hatching eggs and quizzes are absent from Twitter but honestly, who cares? Remember when MySpace started to get all messy and stuffed with spammers and adverts, remember what happened next? Everyone switched to Facebook, who knows, maybe we're about to see the next big social networking exodus.

Why?
This is the hardest question to answer when it comes to social networking, I was a dedicated Facebooker for years but it's always nice to try something new. The micro-blogging style of Twitter suits me. It's not for everyone and there is something just a tiny bit self-involved about publicly narrating your life online but it's satisfying, it keeps you connected with friends and loved ones and above all else, it's a good way to see what Lily Allen has been up to.

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