A crash course in Twitter for dad
So why twitter? How does it help anyone?
The future of social networking. It's _way_ more dynamic than
classical social networking sites (Orkut, Facebook, MySpace etc).
Several people have predicted that Twitter will catch on faster than
anything else.
Twitter is so simple, it confuses many people. It gives you 140
characters to say what you want. Everyone can subscribe to each
others' tweets (these 140-character updates). Look at my Twitter page
for example: http://twitter.com/artagnon. It says "411 following, 376
followers, 1374 updates" and shows you my last 20-odd updates.
Meaning, in my Twitter lifetime, I've posted 1374 tweets that the
public can read. 376 people are following me, and are actively
listening to my tweets. I'm following 411 people and actively
listening to their tweets. These numbers obviously keep changing.
Ofcourse, social networking centers around interaction between human
beings. There are two additional concepts in Twitter: replies and
direct messages. On my page, you'll see some messages like @aditya,
@devakishor etc. These are special tweets (also public) meant as
replies to tweets posted by those people. Direct messages are used to
contact people on Twitter exclusively, without letting the rest of the
public know. It's sort of like email.
That's all there is to it, really.
