TIP: To make a schreen capture of your iPhone, simply press and hold the “Home” button at center bottom of the iPhone, then press and release the “Sleep” button on top right of the iPhone. This causes the iPhone to “flash” white briefly and the image is added to your “camera roll” on the iPhone!

What makes Twitter particularly interesting is the variety of mobile Twitter application on the iPhone. All of them offer different features, and each tries to stand out from the crowd by offering its own assortment of Twitter functionality.

My favorite of the applications I have tried, is Twitterific by “iconfactor.” It offers the most attractive user interface and is by far the easiest to use. Runner-up, in my mind, is Tweetie, which offers a little more functionality but is not quite as easy on the eyes. They both open up the world of Twitter to the user.

They offer even more features than the Twitter website itself! In my opinion, until somebody has used these apps, they have not experienced Twitter and will not understand why it is interesting or even worth using.

It is such an interesting way to communicate and interact with others. Even celebrities! Celebrities love using Twitter because they don’t have to “be friends” with other users like similar social sites would require, such as Facebook or MySpace.

What is challenging about Twitter is that it limits what you want to say to 140 characters, and even text like web links are included. So if you include a web link, you’re pretty limited in what you can say in your “tweet”. That is why a myriad of URL shorteners has sprung up, to make your web liks as short as possible. TinyURL was one of the first to offer this, but their name is actually too long…I use http://z.pe you cannot get any shorter!

A rare feature in Twitter iPhone applications (even the official Twitter site does not offer this) is the ability to see a list of tweets that were written about any particular user. Reading these tweets is often very interesting, especially if they are written to a celebrity. You get to see how normal people would talk to a celebrity, and you can see how the celebrity responded as well. Some Twitter applications allow you to see conversations (or “threads”). This is another advanced feature that not all Twitter apps offer.

A lot of people are talking about Twitter lately. But Twitter works best when people are just using it rather than talking about it. If people talk about it without using it, it could be in danger of becoming a fad.

I personally think that Twitter has a bright future. There are so many improvements and innovations that could be made. When the day comes that I can record a video with my iPhone and then post it on Twitter for all my followers to see instantly, I will be in geek heaven and will more than likely abuse that feature.