What is twitter?

Twitter describes itself as, “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?”

Twitter can be accessed not only through a computer, but also through your internet enabled phone. You can send a single message to one or multiple users, follow friends and read messages sent to you without much difficulty. However, if you are pretty new to this social networking service,  here is an easy guide to help you get started and moving.

You can send a message to a group of users or a single user, or communicate directly with friends you have followed (and have followed you) with short tweets like “I’ll be attending the summer gig this weekend, you may join.” This lets know what your plans are and if they intend to join you.

Twitter has been growing fast too, and in recent times it has been doubling subscriber numbers every month. Its makers said that the past weekend saw the number of messages sent triple, thanks to the conglomeration of users at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Some adopters have taken this growth as the reason to use it as a sort of “internet firehose”, corralling quickfire opinions from around the globe.

Advantages

Twitter is easy to use. In registration, it will only take you less than a minute to join, and no confirmation e-mail needed. You can create as many accounts as you want. Followers are considered friends. Once they follow you through your tweets, you can follow them back and immediately considered you as a friend. Message boards or “tweets” itself can be viewable in public whether you’re friends or not, and you may include your URL as well which is clickable. Twitter also has unique profile templates, which can be created through HTML mode or purchase it through legitimate dealers in different auction sites related to templates.

Disadvantages

Twitter is truly a social networking or social media, but there are many limitations. Twitter has no applications rather than other sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. It also has no groups, videos, blogs, classified ads, forums, marketplace and other unique and popular social networking menus. You can only upload one picture, which is your avatar and must be small, compare to other social networks which you can upload pictures as many as you want. You also cannot upload music files here on Twitter, but you can upload on the other social networks.