The Complete Guide to Twitter | Search for a title, author or keyword | |||||||||||||||
The Complete Guide to Twitter By Mark O’Neill. Twitter has come a long way since its inception in 2006. Back at the beginning, it was just a bunch of people telling the whole world what they were doing right at that very minute. So you were subjected to banal messages such as “just had breakfast!” and “going out to work soon!”. It was messages like these that really turned me off to Twitter when I first discovered it. The service was initially dismissed by some critics as “a platform for mediocrity” and at first I tended to agree with them. But I and many critics were ultimately proved wrong. Twitter now has become so mainstream that huge world news organisations such as CNN and the BBC are using it to collect news. Lots of extremely useful web apps have been built around its API and its popularity and page views puts the site at around number 15 in Alexa’s Top 500 Most Popular Websites. Twitter has been used in US presidential elections by Barack Obama, by top military officers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by surgeons in the operating room and by police sending out public warnings and announcements. Twitter is a website where you can leave messages ( called tweets ) of up to 140 characters long for other people to read. Think of it as the online equivalent of sending mobile phone SMS messages. The messages will instantly appear on your page in the form of a timeline ( newest messages at the top going down to oldest at the bottom ) and may be sent by SMS, e-mail, Twitter APIs based applications, instant messages delivery programs or simply posted in the website. If people like your messages, they can choose to “follow” you by clicking a button at the top of your profile ( they can unfollow you later by clicking the same button ). By following you, your messages will appear in your followers’ Twitter timelines and if you choose to follow back, their messages will appear in your timeline. Twitter is an excellent site to get involved with because of its ability to provide real time information from real people. The best example of this is, of course, Iran when the public went onto the streets in protest of the 2009 national elections. Iranian tweeters were able to bypass official government restrictions and tweet everything that was going on in their country. It got to the point where “official” news agencies such as CNN and the BBC were forced to get their news from Twitter because their own journalists had been expelled from the country. These messages were then presented on the television screen to the viewers. Twitter messages also give the news a “human face” because they are coming directly from the people most affected by the events in question. The Complete Guide to Twitter is free but password-protected. Join MakeUseOf ( only an email address is needed ) to get the password. It will be emailed to you right after you have joined.
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