What is Twitter?
Twitter is a mini-blogging platform that you can use to send messages of 140 characters or less to family, friends, or just the general Web community at large.
Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For some friends you might want instant mobile updates—for others, you can just check the web. Invite your friends to Twitter and decide how connected you want you to be.
How does Twitter work?
When you send in a mobile text (SMS), Twitter sends it out to your group of friends and posts it to your Twitter page. Your friends might not have phone alerts turned on so they may check your web page instead. Likewise, you receive your friends’ mobile updates on your phone.
How does twitter be useful?
There are many different uses for Twitter. Some of the most common are:
- Instant updates. For instance, the Los Angeles Fire Department uses Twitter to keep the community apprised of fire emergences.
- News. You can get up to the minute news updates from many news agencies; for instance, Sky News.
- Friends and family. The majority of Twitter users use it to keep friends and family apprised of what they’re doing at any given moment. It’s a great way to fire off a quick jolt of news if you don’t have a lot of time to write anything more substantial.
Follower:
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as friend and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 4% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as a friend.
To be followed in Twitter.
The family members, friends and school colleagues who are accept you as a follower, so they follow you in twitter. Which means that they are under your account in twitter, so they following you and you have been followed by them.
How do I follow someone?
You can choose to follow, or receive updates from, a person on Twitter using:
- The web: on the profile page of the person you wish to follow, click the Follow button, set notifications to off or on, and close the box.
- Your phone: send follow username in a text message to Twitter. You’ll receive a success message as confirmation. If you decide you don’t want updates on your phone anymore, send leave username.
- Instant Message (IM): send follow username in a chat message to Twitter. You’ll receive confirmation that you’re following the person. Send leave username to stop getting their updates in IM.
- Third party application: most third party apps, like Twitterrific, support all Twitter commands from within the application, so you can follow and leave people easily.
