Defining Twitter

Social media is becoming an integrated part of our daily lives, a way of keeping in touch with our social circle on a day to day basis. But as with everything else people are resistant to change. When I was a kid it was a social stigma to own a mobile phone, but as they became more available people caught up and now it's hard to live without one. Few people install hard lines in their homes these days, and most people have color TV's.

Twitter is the latest addition to the social media scene. But compared to email, blogs and Facebook it's slightly more complicated in it's simplicity. With its 140 signs "it's like a Facebook status update and a blog merged into one" as people tend to explain it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It started out as a simple idea, the SMS of the Internet; a way of exchanging brief messages with friends. However, anyone could pull out tweets (Twitter posts) from the network and sort them in whatever way they wanted. You could browse for keywords, read the trending topics and follow random people. Then some clever fellows figured that if they used a hashtag (#) and a codeword, they could easily sort out the tweets they wanted. A myriad of supporting sites started popping up, and a simple tool became a community.

It takes a while to wrap your head around what Twitter actually is. Here's one way of looking at it. Imagine you walk into a party with millions of other people. Everywhere people are talking, some talk to their friends, some talk to large groups, some about specific topics and some about their lives. As you step into the room, you realize that you have no senses or mental systems for navigating at this party.

Twitter is that system. It allows you to focus your attention towards what you want to hear. You can chose which people to listen to by following them, which topics to listen to following hashtags or search for keywords, and see what discussions are currently taking place by looking at trending topics. As an added bonus, any time someone mentions your name you will hear it.

Facebook is for your old friends, Twitter is for your future friends. Use it well.