Twitter for dummies - Please give a quick rundown on how to use Twitter for those of us who are Twitter challenged?

All in all Basically Twitter is a extremely popular social networking and micro-blogging site that encourages users to write what they are doing exactly in that exact point in time. These micro-blogs are often referred to as "Tweets". "''In other words When you "Tweet" you are "Tweeting" to twitter.''" I've also posted both a video file below that explains in plain english what twitter is and how people can make use of it.

( You can find those at the bottom of the answer ) Bellow I will outline different aspects of the service, it's background, rise to popularity and user applications. : : : : : : ..::Company Background::.. Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams ( @ev ) in 9/25/093 The service was initially funded by Obvious Corp . It's current base of operations is in San Francisco.

Twitter has about 100-200+ employees and fulltime staff. : : : : : ..::Rise to popularity & Milestones::.. Twitter gained enormous popularity after the some key celebrity endorsements as well as the launch of a service called Summize ( In 2007 / 2008 ) , which allowed users to search threw twitter 's database of Micro-Blogs.(Tweets) Since there was now a market for this, this complimenting service made twitter extremely useful for brand marketing and public announcements. This is what the old summize site search tool looked like.

--Then finally the straw that broke the camels back and brought twitter immense popularity was the Kutcher Vs CNN "war" On 6/9/088, actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to have one million followers. Kutcher was in a race with CNN, with both sending donations to purchase nets to protect against the spread of Malaria in Africa.Cnet: Ashton Outmaneuvers CNN to 1 Million on Twitter13 Kutcher's story was featured on the 6/9/088, episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which Oprah Winfrey was sending her first Tweet. Bits (NYT): Oprah's First Words on Twitter: "HI TWITTERS" In my humble opinion some other grate twitter landmarks which have pushed its popularity are but not limited to.

--Quoted Info-- Twitter received $100M in Series D funding.(9/25/09) Twitter received $35M in Series C funding. (6/9/086/9/089) Twitter acquired Values of n.(9/25/08) Twitter acquired Summize.(7/15/08) Twitter partners with Summize to cover Apple news. (6/9/08) 9 Twitter Launches a status blog to communicate to users better about issues with the service.

(6/9/086/9/087) Twitter received $15M in Series B funding.(9/25/093) Twitter Japan Launches (6/9/088/08) Twitter helps bust American man out of Egyptian jail (6/9/089/25) Twitter received $5M in Series A funding.(7/1/07) --/Quoted Info-- Also (From the Mahalo Twitter) one extremely key milestone was earlier this year around the time of the Iranian Elections. _ Following the elections in Iran in June of 2009, the U.S. State Department reportedly asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance to their system as the Iranians were using the twitter service to coordinate protests to the disputed election results _ (Photo for Affect)

: : : : : : ..::End-User Software & Complimenting Applications::.. There are also some other excellent complimenting twitter web applications I would recommend checking out. I highly recommend reading the following article on the top Twitter tools available to end users.

http://keepersacc.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/my-top-5-free-twitter-productivity-tools/ I also recommend a service called Gowalla ( Designed for but not limited to the iPhone ) Gowalla.com And the free or pro version of Ad. Ly . You can also use a desktop client (Software) to post messages to twitter, some popular programs are.. TweetDeck - http://www.TweetDeck.com HootSuite - http://www.HootSuite.com DestroyTwitter - http://www.DestroyTwitter.com More are listed on this page.

http://twitter.com/downloads And on the Twitter Mahalo page. And here is a page that lists the top 21 Twitter clients. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/the-top-21-twitter-clients-according-to-twitstat/ There are also 3 tools that have been invaluable to me using twitter.1.

) GoodByeBuddy By following the user @GoodByeBuddy on twitter you can have a direct message sent to you everytime someone unfollows you.2. ) TweetGrid A twitter web application for tracking trends in a single browser window.3. ) ReFollow A Twitter relationship manager that was developed by Originate Labs.

You can do cool things like quickly view info about friends and followers, explore other’s friends and followers, filter, sort, bulk follow/unfollow/block, tag users, add user comments, and lock relationships. If you would like any other information about twitter don't be afraid to send me a Direct Question or comment under this answer. And I will do my best to answer your concerns or queries.

Kind Regards, @XDS PS: EDIT: Please also look at the following question on how to increase your following.

0 I'd say all the same information applies in this situation as well.

Twitter is a social "Microblogging" site. You can send 140-character messages, which are often simple status updates, quick anecdotes, or notes and links about interesting topics. Twitter has also become a resource for marketing and for companies to create a more "personal" connection with customers.

You follow someone to see messages they send. Keep in mind their account may be private and require approval before you can follow them. People who follow you can see the messages you send.

Sending a message is called "Tweeting" and individual messages are referred to as "tweets. " Twitter also support Direct Messages, which are private, creating lists to organize the people you follow, and customizing your user page on twitter.com There are several conventions: 1. When talking to someone, you put "@" and their username.

Twitter will do this for you automatically if you reply to someone. 2. A hash mark (#) placed in front of a work (or words mashed together with no spaces) is a way of tagging a post.

Hash tags are used to track trends, find information relevant to a topic, and sometimes to opt-in to contests. 3. If someone you follow tweets something interesting, you can "Re-Tweet" it, making it available for your network.

Twitter recently added a link for this capability. Manually retweets are usually prefaced with "RT" for retweet. 4.

You can mark posts as favorites by clicking the star outline. This provides a very basic "bookmark" system where you can view your favorite tweets. There is a link on the Twitter sidebar for your favorites.

You can un-favorite a tweet from that page. 5. Because of the 140-character limit, URL shortening services like bit.Ly and tinyurl.com are popular.

These sites let you take a long site address and create a short address suitable for posting within the limitations. There are tools that will automatically expand the addresses for you so you know where you are going before you click. There are a number of programs available for computers and most mobile devices that allow you to use Twitter remotely.

Twitter also supports the ability to tweet by sending text messages (SMS).

Twitter for Dummies by a Twitter Dummy I have to answer your question from a Dummy perspective because I have been only using Twitter for six months or so. I will share with you what I have learned up to this point. It will be enough to get you up to speed.In six months you will be able to write an advanced version.

Maybe, "Advanced Twitter for Advanced Dummies"! On Twitter people post small messages (140 characters or less). Each message is called a '''Tweet".

Sometimes people want to send a URL (website address) along with their message. Because these can be quite long and space is limited people use services such as http://bit.ly/ bit.Ly or http://tinyurl.com/ tinyurl.com. Each user can follow other people's tweets and people can follow their tweets.

Thus, on each users page you can see how many people they are following and how many followers they have. I doubt if very many people have the same lists. The tweets (messages) you receive will be unique based on the people you are following.

When you send out a tweet only those that are following you will see it. If you specify only one person (called a direct message - "D username message" ), only that person will see the message. If you start a message with @username, everyone following you will see the message but know you are addressing a particular user.

As a side note here you can put hashmarks (#word ) into the tweet. These act as tags. People can search for all tweets that contain a specific tag.

Sorry, I digress. Users on Twitter tend to fall into two different camps. One camp I will call friends or talkers.

These people tend to send tweets back and forth and have short conversations. They keep up with each other and prefer to hear from each other. Generally you can tell these people from their profile because the will have about the same number of followers as they are following.

The other camp I will call announcers. These people are more like a talk show host. They tweet on a variety of things, topics, favorite web sites, insights, thoughts of the day, etc. You can tell these people from their profile because they will have many more followers then they follow.

These two camps sometimes don't care for each other. One wants to talk and the other wants a give and take conversation. I am in the middle, I like both camps.

Retweeting is an interesting thing. By the means of retweeting, a message can spread to many users fast. Say you tweet to all your followers.

They in turn retweet to their followers which most likely is a completely different list. Then their followers retweet. You can see how fast a message can spread.

Both camps use retweeting with great effect. You can tell a tweet is a retweet (usually) because it will begin with RT. To follow someone, go to their Twitter home page and press the follow button.To unfollow, you do the same except select unfollow from a drop down menu.

In general I have found that if a person is in the announcer camp and I unfollow they will not even notice (we don't know each other anyway). If the person is in the friends group (say a sister) they will notice. About the only time I unfollow someone is when they tweet a lot and it is about a subject that I don't care about.

I find reading through these can be time consuming and irritating (I have a low frustration tolerance). I have never had any bad feedback by unfollowing. I have had many thank you's for following people.

Finding people to follow is not as hard as it seems. First, twitter has a people search function. That will get you started.

Next, you will run into a lot of sites that have an option to follow them on twitter. You can also use lists (that is a topic in itself). Here is one list to get you started.

It is a list of URL7 Mahaloians! There are a number of programs that help organize and manage your followers. I have only dabbled in them so can't give much information (I said I am a Dummy).

The one program that I do use is called http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ TweetDeck. It allows me to follow Twitter, Facbook, and Linkedin, all in one place. I do not like going from site to site to site to keep up with what is happening.

This program simplifies the whole process. You can also post to all or each one individually. Finally to point you further down the road, check out the following excellent pages here on Mahalo.

Twitter and How to Use Twitter Hashtags. Happy Tweeting!P.S. You may also enjoy the following video (Twitter for Dummies).

On Twitter and tweeting, I find the following guides/websites extremely useful: 1. Mashable Guidebook for Twitter Mashable has compiled a Guidebook for Twitter. mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/ The Guidebook is downloadable as a PDF file. I strongly recommend Twitter newbies to download a copy to read.

This is indeed a good one-stop website for Twitter. 2. This socialblog has compiled “100 Twitter tools to help you achieve all your goals�.

http://www.sociableblog.com/2009/03/18/100-twitter-tools-to-help-you-achieve-all-your-goals/ 3. Oneforty “oneforty is your place to find, rate, collect and share the best tools for you, and to tell the world what you're accomplishing with Twitter. €?

http://oneforty.com/ It works in Web2.0 way. Peoples come in to introduce their twitter apps, recommend the Twitter apps they develop, they use etc. It tells you what are the new apps, apps in different categories, platforms and their ratings/reviews.It also lists the “Essential� And “ Most Popular�.

A very good way to keep track of Twitter apps. Other recommendations of Twitter application will be outdated. This website won’t, as it is updated by users in real time in a Web 2.0 way.

4. Who to follow http://www.ceostweeting.com/ In the “check these out too� Section, there are links to : athletes, celebrities, cyclists, models, politicians, techPundits, triathletes etc… that tweet, each in its own category.

This is useful to know views of the persons, for e.g. CEOs' views.. Available also are who these "athletes, celebrities, cyclists, models, politicians, techPundits, triathletes etc" tweet about too. This is useful to know who they follow and tweet about, their "sources" of ideas.

How you use Twitter is going to depend on what you want to use it for. It's like a rapidly-flowing stream that you can dip into when you want to, or you can float leaf boats down it, or you can go fly fishing for a certain kind of trout. You will only see the updates of those you "follow", and people will only see yours if they are your "followers".

However, there are search engines that pick up real-time results for Twitter, and those will use your "tweets" (messages) to determine what things are "trending", or being talked about the most. Marketers and journalists pay attention to what's trending. Most people don't.

If you don't want to follow someone anymore, because they keep tweeting about how their dog poops or something equally gross/boring, then you find them in your "Followers" and just click "unfollow" and you won't see their updates anymore. Short URLS are there so you won't waste your precious 140 characters in giving a long URL! Twitter has Bit.Ly by default.

There are at least 100 services, but why not use the one that's right there? I think tools like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop and Hootsuite make using Twitter easier. Twitter's website makes it hard to see when someone is just tweeting to you alone, or when someone else mentions you.

These three tools allow you to have several columns for different purposes and even let you see Facebook updates. Hootsuite will let you use more than one account on each service, in case you have Facebook or Twitter accounts that are both personal and professional. Follow Fridays are a Friday tradition that started last spring.

Mashable.com posts some pretty interesting lists, and so does Techcrunch. Mashable's include not only tech, but science, home, and even foodie lists. Same with Lifehacker.

If you need tools to follow what's trending, tweetmeme.com and retweetist.com are both good.

Brian, The charm of Twitter is its brevity, but also how it easily links to other applications, to blogs, web pages, YouTube videos, and much more. When you set up your account you should include a link if you have a blog or web site. This allows visitors to your twitter page to learn more about you.

I decide if I want to follow someone after looking at their remarks and their web link. If I am going to include a link to a page or article, I either use tinyurl.com to shorten it or access twitter using the program TweetDeck, which is also the easiest way to edit long tweets before you RT them. Twitter's RT button is set to repeat verbatim the same tweet to all of your followers.

If you want to edit the tweet from the twitter home page, you need to highlight and copy the message then paste it into your status bar and put "RT" at the front and @ next to the name of the original sender. I often have to abbreviate the original post to fit my remark after it. If people I follow tweet too much or aren't what I hoped, I unfollow them again.

This is in contrast to a "block," when nothing about them will come through into my twitter feed. Others don't get a message if I unfollow or block, and if nothing is said, they probably won't notice. Followers come and go.

Those with fairly equal numbers of followers and following are usually trying to gain followers and if you don't follow them they go away after a few days. On the right hand side of your home page is a highlighted box under your numbers. This changes each time you load the page, and is twitter's way of letting you discover applications and related programs that work in conjunction with twitter.At the bottom of each post in your feed is a link to the method folks used to send their tweets.

The best way to learn about twitter is to follow a few folks for a while and see how they do it. It'll come to you. The Mashable Guidebook to Twitter will give you all of the links and descriptions you could possibly need.

mashable.com/guidebook/twitter.

Twitter is a way to quickly send out message to a group of people that are following you and status, but it has changed into a way to promote web sites and other services re-tweeting is a system in twitter is to pass a tweet from someone to your followers un-following is to stop following a person on twitter short urls are service to make urls that maybe too long with the combine text to put into 140 characters to a smaller redirection url and you can't be a fan that is facebook, not twitter.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.