Twitter: What is and How to guide…

Twitter is a social networking and messaging site. It has grown very rapidly in the past few months, mostly due to some famous personalities and even organizations using it’s micro-blogging service.
This article is an introduction to Twitter and also a helpful resource for people who would like to use it’s services.

Twitter started a couple of years back.The founders brought the idea of SMS into the internet and came up with a networking site where users can stay connected to their friends and family members by updating their status with a text that is limited only to 140 chars, similar to most short messaging services.

For any one who is used to the normal chat clients and other networking sites, the messaging limit may sound bizarre in the beginning. Well, according to Twitter, short is sweet. You dont really have to chat online for a couple of hours or spend hours of your precious time browsing one of the many existing social networking sites just to stay connected to your friends or make new ones.

How to get started with Twitter?

First, you will have to register with Twitter. Here is the link: https://twitter.com/signup.They require any email ID of yours for the registration. This email ID is later used in the process to extract all of your contacts automatically and find them on Twitter. This way you dont have to add your friends one by one yourself.

Twitter users could be anyone: persons, organizations, companies etc. Examples are Barack Obama, CNN Breaking News, Reuters India etc.
We have signed up for Twitter with the username ‘dkszone’. Twitter gives web users a lot many choices of colors and background themes.

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How to tweet?
Tweet is the lingo used by Twitter users for sending updates. Just type in your text into the text box on the home page and press update to send the message either to all your followers or to any one privately. Twitter uses simple commands to specify the receiver(s) of updates and also to Follow/Leave other Twitter users. These commands can be found at http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/14020

Mobile ConnectivityTwitter offers it’s services through it’s web interface, web applications which can be downloaded and installed (available at http://twitter.com/downloads) and also to your mobile. All messages can be sent and received using your mobile after setting the Device options from the Settings Page.

Currently Twitter offers short codes for U.S, Canada, U.K and India. Other countries have to use their international number. All numbers are given here.
How to Follow and be Followed?
In Twitter there are no ‘friends’ or ‘contacts’. There are only ‘Followers’ and ‘Followed’.
You could be a ‘Follower’ of some one, actually any person or organization or company who is also registered is on Twitter. The ‘Find People’ page helps you find Twitter users. For e.g., trying to find ‘tech’ gave the following results.

Just click on the Follow button when you find the Twitter user you are looking for and from then on all the status updates sent by this Twitter user are received by you. For e.g., we added ‘davos’ (world economic forum) and ‘gadgets’ to the “following”. The Home page of Twitter now shows the latest updates from us and also the people we follow.

‘Gadgets’ is a status update on the latest technology provided by Twitter itself. If you are a techno lover then you may like to follow this update.