Twitter® For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Sharing Your Thoughts, 140 Characters at a Time

In This Chapter

• Understanding what Twitter's all about

• Seeing how individuals, organizations, and businesses use Twitter

• Discovering what you can do with Twitter

• Looking into third-party Twitter applications

You may have heard of Twitter but have no idea what it actually is. Twitter is basically a powerful social network that allows you to keep up with the people, businesses, and organizations you're interested in — whether you know them personally or not. It also lets you share what you're doing with the world — everyone from your family and friends to complete strangers. (You'll have to bear with us to find out why you would want to do that.) Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee (@amcaffee) describes Twitter this way: "With Twitter, my friends are never far away."

And www.twitter.com itself says that The New York Times calls Twitter "one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet." Time magazine says, "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app," and Newsweek noted that "Suddenly, it seems as though all the world's a-twitter." What will you think?

Every day, we see dozens of new ideas and ways to use Twitter. In this chapter, we do our best to introduce the basic ideas and explain how Twitter works and why it's so powerful.

Figuring Out This Twitter Thing

Twitter is a fast-evolving, surprisingly powerful new way to exchange ideas and information, and to stay in touch with people, businesses, and organizations that you ...