Do You Twitter?

Despite its spectacular rise, many people give you strange looks when you say you Twitter. So what exactly is twitter? The owners of Twitter suggests that it is a way to communicate with others by providing quick and frequent answers to the simple question – What are you doing?

Basically, Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to send and receive user updates. These updates are known as ‘tweets’ and have a maximum length of 140 characters. Because of this, Twitter has also been termed a micro-blogging service. Of course, many tweets are extremely mundane and many question why this service should be so popular. For example, you may not be all that interested in what your friend had for breakfast.

However, you can use Twitter as a productivity tool. For example, you can use it to maintain a to-do list or send yourself a reminder. Because you can also send messages via SMS, this can be really useful when you don’t have access to your computer.

You can also establish groups by ‘following’ your friends and having them follow you. In this way, you can update all of them at once. If you can’t make a night out you can simply send ‘ Sorry, can’t make it tonight’. This can also work in a business setting such as times when you are going to be late for a meeting. It can also be used for person to person messaging because there is a command that allows you to send a message directly to another user.

Another great facet is that it is RSS feed enabled. If you don’t have the time to maintain a blog about your product or service you can still keep clients updated if they subscribe to your feed. For example, a video store owner could send a message about the latest video release. Twitter is being used by some as a valuable marketing tool. Unfortunately, there are some who take advantage of this and try to spam the system.

One big problem is that it can become a terrible time waster if you aren’t disciplined. Many people find it best to set aside a set amount of time, say 30 minutes, in the morning and the same again in the evening. If it becomes too annoying you can send the command Off, Sleep, or Stop to Twitter. If you only twitter from your computer then simply avoid the website.