Facebook is sooo last season. You’ve probably heard people speaking about Twitter or tweeting. Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length

Updates are displayed on your profile page and delivered to others who have chosen to ‘follow’ your tweets.

By February 2009, Twitter had 55 million daily users. Your personal interests or work will probably dictate which twitterers (twits? ☺) you decide to follow…. as they update their status this is fed as a running stream into your twitter account.

You can use twitter to share your thoughts, interesting web links or news, details of your latest hot date - thanks to (hook me up)5, your pictures, your opinion – whatever you like.

The aim is to find twitterers to follow so that you can receive and share updated / news / info / opinion as quickly as possible. If you share quality information people will decide to follow your updates and so your social network grows.

To give you a visual idea of how twitter works I asked my ‘twitterstream’ for their tweets on why they use twitter and why it adds value to them.

Twitter is a social network-the aim is to find and follow other twitter users... it's not much fun if you feel like you're talking to yourself. It works using very basic commands, you can mark certain tweets as favourites, tweet someone directly and can also receive personal Direct Message tweets that only you will see. The 2 most basic commands you need to know are @ and D

@username + message

directs a twitter at another person, and causes your tweet to be saved in their "replies" tab.

Example: @username Did you hear that rocking Madonna remix on Poppy’s show?

D username + message
sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.
Example: D username check out the blogpost on chat applications tinyurl.com/cdxow3

There are some more complex commands here.

Many Twitter users share web links via twitter but because a lot of url addresses are very long it’s a good idea to use a url shortening website. I like tinyURL look here for a list of more services.

So for example this address www.5fm.co.za/djs/Poppy/blog/our-5-fave-instant-messaging-chat-applications becomes tinyurl.com/cdxow3

There are a lot of 3rd party applications you can use to follow twitter from your PC or cell phone. Click here to find one that works for you.

Twitter is free – go to twitter select your unique username and password and signup for an account. You’ll then be given your own personal twitter homepage twitter.com/yourusername

See twittersa.com for SA twitterers, also look at satwitter.pbwiki.com for a directory of SA twitterers, and if you’re an SA twitterer who is not on this list then add your details.

Signup for twitter and send me a tweet to kick things off: @melattree I found twitter thanks to 5fm and the Global Express