CS: What the heck is Twitter, and why would I want to use it?
[This is a rare public entry.]
Many people I know seem to be curious about what exactly Twitter is, and why they might want to use it. That's not easy to do; I myself was skeptical of the medium (I tend to resist popular trends, at least temporarily), until I gave in and tried it.
I will, however, give explaining it a try.
In short: Twitter is a combination of instant messaging, blogging, social networking, and text messaging.
Twitter allows a person to create a blog of sorts; however, the entries - called tweets - are not of arbitrary length (like, say, on LiveJournal), but have a fixed maximum of 140* characters. This limitation allows Twitter to be posted to - and read (an action called "following") - on almost any device, ranging from a full-size PC, to a simple cell phone via text messaging (SMS).
The social networking aspect comes in because each user has a "friends list" of sorts, called a "following list." Like LiveJournal's friends page, Twitter gathers the tweets of all the people a person follows into a single list, called a timeline. When reading from a PC or most "smart" mobile devices, the timeline is displayed in list form; however, when a cell with SMS is being used, each tweet from a followed person is sent as an SMS message.
When a person tweets - which can be done via many methods, including sending an SMS message to a special number via cell (which is free of charge, as long as you already have an unlimited texting plan on your cell) - it is put in the gathered timeline of your followers, and dispatched by SMS to those of your followers utilizing Twitter via SMS.
The similarity to instant messaging - where Twitter really becomes interesting, in my opinion - is because there are two main methods of directly interacting with other Twitter users.
You may notice that my LoudTwitter reposts to LiveJournal (if you're on my LiveJournal friends list) have a lot of tweets starting with @. This is the first form of direct interaction - called a reply, directed tweet, pointing a tweet, among others. Simply put, having @[username] in a tweet will cause it to show up in a special section on [username]'s Twitter.
(Traditionally, the @ portion is placed at the beginning of a tweet; however, it will be detected anywhere in the tweet. It's also possible to use multiple @[username] terms, and point the tweet at multiple users.)
There is one important thing to remember about @ tweets, though - they are public! If one wants to speak privately via Twitter, there is a way: Assuming the person you want to speak privately to is following you (this is a requirement!), you can send what's called a Direct Message, or DM. These don't show up in any public timeline or log.
To conclude, Twitter puts the best developments in the past decade of interactive, user-driven communication into a system that one can use anywhere. It's pure brilliance.
*: The 140 character limit applies to languages that use the Latin alphabet, like English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc; I don't know for sure how Twitter treats other alphabets or character sets. Japanese ideograms seem to be supported; traditionally, SMS in Japanese allows only half the normal character limit of the Latin alphabet, because each character requires two bytes (instead of Latin's one byte) to express it electronically.
Many people I know seem to be curious about what exactly Twitter is, and why they might want to use it. That's not easy to do; I myself was skeptical of the medium (I tend to resist popular trends, at least temporarily), until I gave in and tried it.
I will, however, give explaining it a try.
In short: Twitter is a combination of instant messaging, blogging, social networking, and text messaging.
Twitter allows a person to create a blog of sorts; however, the entries - called tweets - are not of arbitrary length (like, say, on LiveJournal), but have a fixed maximum of 140* characters. This limitation allows Twitter to be posted to - and read (an action called "following") - on almost any device, ranging from a full-size PC, to a simple cell phone via text messaging (SMS).
The social networking aspect comes in because each user has a "friends list" of sorts, called a "following list." Like LiveJournal's friends page, Twitter gathers the tweets of all the people a person follows into a single list, called a timeline. When reading from a PC or most "smart" mobile devices, the timeline is displayed in list form; however, when a cell with SMS is being used, each tweet from a followed person is sent as an SMS message.
When a person tweets - which can be done via many methods, including sending an SMS message to a special number via cell (which is free of charge, as long as you already have an unlimited texting plan on your cell) - it is put in the gathered timeline of your followers, and dispatched by SMS to those of your followers utilizing Twitter via SMS.
The similarity to instant messaging - where Twitter really becomes interesting, in my opinion - is because there are two main methods of directly interacting with other Twitter users.
You may notice that my LoudTwitter reposts to LiveJournal (if you're on my LiveJournal friends list) have a lot of tweets starting with @. This is the first form of direct interaction - called a reply, directed tweet, pointing a tweet, among others. Simply put, having @[username] in a tweet will cause it to show up in a special section on [username]'s Twitter.
(Traditionally, the @ portion is placed at the beginning of a tweet; however, it will be detected anywhere in the tweet. It's also possible to use multiple @[username] terms, and point the tweet at multiple users.)
There is one important thing to remember about @ tweets, though - they are public! If one wants to speak privately via Twitter, there is a way: Assuming the person you want to speak privately to is following you (this is a requirement!), you can send what's called a Direct Message, or DM. These don't show up in any public timeline or log.
To conclude, Twitter puts the best developments in the past decade of interactive, user-driven communication into a system that one can use anywhere. It's pure brilliance.
*: The 140 character limit applies to languages that use the Latin alphabet, like English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc; I don't know for sure how Twitter treats other alphabets or character sets. Japanese ideograms seem to be supported; traditionally, SMS in Japanese allows only half the normal character limit of the Latin alphabet, because each character requires two bytes (instead of Latin's one byte) to express it electronically.