You ever fancied yourself a blogger but failed to have the energy or time to post considerate or daft missives at regular intervals? Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some folk call it microblogging or moblogging, I really like to think about Twitter simply as blogging for regular folks. Perhaps you are actually busy. Perhaps you do not have much to assert. Or perhaps you are just lazy.

No problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group SMS message to your friends’ mobile telephones from your own telephone, a rapid message or an Internet form at twitter.com. All of your notes are then stored and shown on your private profiling page on the site, which includes links to your friends’ Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choosing, and a short bio. You can even send text updates immediately to your FaceBook or MySpace page. Just don’t forget to keep it short: posts are restricted to one hundred and forty characters, and the subject is, usually, “what are you doing?”. More frequently than not, it seems, Twitter’s 25,000,000 members (twice as many as it had merely six months back, according to Twitter business development director Biz Stone), are simply killing time.

Even presidential candidate John Edwards is on it, though he appears to be the sole one pondering more than lunch. As I type this, Caroline is mulling over some Girl Scout cookies, ian_hocking is “Waiting for Jessica to arrive so we will be able to eat!” and hlantz is “having a pleasant cup of Soft Starmint tea.” Exciting .

The gossip about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar last year in the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex, when the barebones service owned by Blogger founder Evan Williams, 34, was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties.

Since that point, the fawning attention to the service has come full-circle as reviewers have started to realize how uninteresting most of the people’s lives actually are. ( As if YouTube’s studio of puppy and kitten videos had not already driven that point home. )

Nevertheless, Twitter has been the top term on blog search engine Technorati for the previous 12 months. Lots of folk would happily have Twitter muzzled, instead of endure the beeping alert for yet another new text. But I am gambling that Twitter will get a lot noisier before tweople move on to the following new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs FaceBook and, candidly, that site is getting off. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what could be better than a service that mixes social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other corporations try to do a similar thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google’s Dodgeball.

But only Twitter has worked out the easy way to make it easy. I know, it’s absolutely mad and shallow, but that is exactly why Twitter is on its way to turning into the next killer app.

And if you detest it, well, in the words of one Twit from San Francisco, “I’m so sick to death of Twitter-haters. If you do not like it, why waste your time writing, reading, or talking about it?

Well, last night’s Grammy awards showed a new feature of Twitter.  Seconds after Steven Colbert pulled an iPad from his jacket, it was tweeted and live on YouTube! It was interesting to see how it looked when someone captured the TV image on his iPhone and then sent it to YouTube and tweeted about it…This works? well, except the quality of the video is below standard…So can anyone tell me how I can get the TV feed on my iPhone so I can record it in real-time and share it with the world now?

Twitter recently announced a new feature on their website. This feature allows users to organize the people they find interesting on Twitter in so-called “lists”. The twitter list function shows up at the top of your account page providing easy access to create your own lists.  Users can create multiple lists for different purposes, a list of friends, artists or just a list of their favorites brands.

If you click on the list, it will only show tweets from the people you put in that the list. Maybe you were was expecting that this function will let you control which people can read my tweets, but that’s not the case. Twitter lists let you organize how you can more selectively read tweets posted by people on your list. You can select what list you want to read instead of reading your whole stream.

Twitter has chosen to keep the lists separate from your followers.  In other words, you do not have to follow someone to add him/her to a list that you create. You can also remove your name from any list you don’t want to be on. If someone adds you to a list you don’t want to be on, you can block that user and you automatically remove yourself from the list.

Lists can be public or private. If you choose them to be public you are sharing your list with the world, if you set it to private, only you can use it. Twitter lists can also be used to create widgets from a specific list allowing you to post them on your blog or social network site.  Basically, twitter lists are a new way to group and share people you find interesting. Currently users can’t exceed 20 lists with a maximum of 500 tweople.

Companies or brands can create multiple lists based on specific users with requested backgrounds or topics. The list feature is a powerful marketing tool for research and live search of people’s reactions to product releases, events or general feedback about anything. This was a prominent feature that a lot of people were asking for.

Considering that these twitter lists are linked from your personal account, there is a great possibility that users who are regular viewers of your activity will be introduced to new and exciting twitter accounts that you are following and feature within a list. You could help your friends follow funny or interesting Twitter users that they were previously unaware of!

In the past, users have recommended Twitter accounts to follow by tweeting the user name with the tag ‘#followfriday’ every Friday. Each week on this day the tag tops the list of Twitter Trending Topics. However, now with the invention of the list feature, this tag may become less popular as friends can simply look at your lists to discover new accounts worth following. If you need to see an example of a twitter list, the Twitter team that developed this feature has created a list showcasing all of their activity that can be seen at http://twitter.com/twitter/team. This is a great way for the people at Twitter to stay connected through this list and read each other’s status updates quickly, without sorting through hundreds of other feeds they are subscribed to. You can link your own job’s member accounts together in a list and share it on the company website.

You can even feature your Twitter lists on your own website or on your favorite social networking sites by utilizing the Twitter List Widget (http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list). Simply fill out your information on the Twitter List Widget page and the site will produce the proper HTML code that you can embed on your own personal or business site to share your list.

I always jump on the social networking bandwagon. I have a MySpace that I don’t use, a LinkedIn that I don’t understand and a FaceBook that I’m addicted to.

So when I heard about Twitter, I thought it was dumb (to put it mildly.) To be fair, as a general rule, anything that is promoted by news stations before the general public knows about it, I believe is trash.

Three months ago however, one of my many employers sent out a mass email telling us to follow them on Twitter. I am a full-time college student who does marketing jobs on the weekends; passing out flyers, signing people up for credit cards, doing food samples at Walmart/Sams Clubs and going to concerts and giving out free stuff.

The email stated that extra job openings will be tweeted 3 times a day. Usually these marketing gigs go by quick because they pay well and the work is not too difficult. So, I swallowed my pride and joined the twitter world.

After browsing, I realized that a majority of my marketing employers used Twitter to post new job openings that they don’t send through mass emails. I started to follow all my employers, potential employers, family and friends too.

I linked my cell phone to Twitter and I receive on average 100 text messages a day from potential employers. I was getting sick of it and about to quit until something great happened.

Last month, I received a Tweet on my cell phone while eating dinner. My boyfriend rolled his eyes because he is sick of hearing “Almost Easy” every hour when my cell phone “Tweets” goes off. The tweet said “Cartoon Network Event in WPB, FL need staff immediately.”

I called my staffing coordinator and she hired me that second. I worked that entire week and got my biggest paycheck ever. $1,000 for roughly 30 hours of work, that’s a lot for a college student (Although it’s gone now, due to wonderful bills.)

So, I have resumed being in love with Twitter. I use it primarily for work (I have FaceBook for friends/family) and I get so many extra jobs from it.

I know that Twitter can revolutionize the job hunting process for many unemployed people. I read an article claiming that Twitter has helped many people find jobs.

Employers like Palm Beach Post and ATT post jobs on Twitter and it can be great to be able to get job postings to your cell phone so you don’t have to sit by the computer all the time.

I wonder if Craigslist has a Twitter?

You always hear people talking about social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. Forget about those sites and check out Twitter! Everyone is all hot and bothered by the new internet craze called Twitter. It is on the lips of every CNN news anchor, Conan O’Brien talks about it on the Tonight Show on NBC, and even recently my own mother has started twittering.

Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with friends, family, co-workers and other people you who want to know what’s going on in your life when you want them to. You can send out tweets through your phone or computer and people can follow you through their phone or computer.

More than just a large way to “text the world” Twitter has become a way to reach a large amount of people in a very short span of time with a very short number of characters. It’s great for on the go and when there’s too much people to stay in touch with you can just twitter to let them know what’s been going on with you.

You can also send a twitpic, which lets you share pictures with your followers. For example, when you are on vacation, take a picture with your camera phone and upload it straight to twitpic from your phone to let your followers see what you’re doing at that very moment.

Try using the search engine and find your family and friends who may be on twitter. You might want to follow people as well and get their updates. You can reply directly to your friends twitter updates and they can do the same. You don’t have to worry about privacy because you can make your page private and only let your friends view your updates or you can make it public for everyone to view.

You can control who follows you also by accepting or denying peoples requests. If you don’t know anyone on twitter there is a “Suggested Users” page where you can find interesting people to follow.
A lot of celebrities are on twitter too. Try doing a name search to find your favorite celebrity and follow them to get their updates. You’ll find everyone and anyone on twitter.

Also try following your favorite television show or your favorite store you love to shop at. It’s a great way to find out when the store is having a sale or other great deals. I used the “invite by email” page on twitter and got all my family and friends to sign up and follow me and I’m following them too.

I know in my experience I have used Twitter in more than just a causal way. I have found that Twitter can be a useful funnel of people into your own blog or actual money making website.

The thing is that you have to have a good hook. You have to have a gimmick that no one else uses. For me, I have used a “joke a day” idea to keep people interested in my website. The jokes pertain to the topic of my website and I include a link to my website in each Twitter post.

This idea can be adapted in a number of ways for your website or business. If you have a humorous business you can go the “joke a day” route. Serious business men might not want their business promoted by whatever lame quips you have hired the temp to come up with.

You can also try a “fact of the day” but make sure to make it interesting and make sure it relates to the type of business you are trying to promote using Twitter. Once people are hooked on your “whatever it is of the day” then you can watch the ad dollars start rolling in.

It doesn’t take much time to set up a Twitter account or to come up with a bunch of jokes, or ideas, or facts of the day. All you need is 20 minutes on Google and you are all hooked up.
Who knows, once this Twitter craze dies down, your company might still be known as that one place where they give out the interesting facts, or silly puns.

I would image that once you have hooked your new clients in with Twitter, your fabulous customer service and dedication to a quality product will take over.

No matter what age you are, twitter is great, fun and easy to use.

Twitter is a preview of the third generation of the web, where we are communicating in real-time. The first generation of the Web was rather static. It was mostly about companies displaying their products and services on web pages. Individuals started creating personal websites, but they too were static. The Web was used for publishing and a lot of screen scraping was done to cut and paste from other websites so you could fill your own.

The second generation of the Web, the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ was already more interactive. With the advent of Web services, the web became a more connected place. Companies now had to show much more interaction with their customers and started using the social networking media like MySpace and Facebook, to set up a dialogue with their customers. Individuals were using these social networking media to connect with their friends and to keep them posted on what they were doing. Everywhere you could see ‘wikis’ being set up and individuals started blogging about a wide range of subjects. This created a web where you could follow what was going on in a certain niche and take part in the discussion.

The third generation of the Web is about to break loose. Here we take one step further than interactive, we go real-time. Here the Web is just there… connecting everything and every body. We will see real-time interactions between devices and people are juicing a gigantic stream of data that everybody can jump into. Surely people will still be concerned about what happened in the past, but this generation of the web is about what’s happening now.

Twitter gives us a glimpse of what this the third generation of the Web could be like. It lets us communicate in near real-time, but it resembles a stream of information we can dip into.

Many things that happen in the world are reported on Twitter first. When that plane landed in the Hudson River early 2009 a guy called Janis Krums was on the ferry picking up the first survivors. He took a picture of the plane and tweeted this to the world. When the elections in Iran in June 2009 were over, the world learned from the many tweets from Iran that there were violent protests against the election results. When the protests started, the regular news media like CNN did not pick this up for hours. This in itself caused a big discussion on Twitter (#cnnfail) about the role that the regular news media should be playing, where what is happening on Twitter is taken into account. The issue here is: can what is tweeted be trusted by the news media or is further investigation required. The answer is a difficult one, but one thing is clear “ the truth is more seen than read”, so anything that is documented on video or photos, can be trusted more than what is just written.

Twitter’s services aren’t limited to only Twitter users. If you want to keep everyone on Facebook up to date, applications allow you update your Facebook status with your most recent tweet. It’s likely that many of your friends in your Facebook network are not yet members of Twitter, so you may find that updating multiple statuses becomes cumbersome. What you may not know is that you can link your Twitter to your Facebook account! That’s right, if you update your Twitter status, you can automatically update your Facebook status. This allows you to begin to build a Twitter network, while keeping your Facebook status up-to-date at the same time.

Additionally, Facebook notes that your status is being updated via Twitter, which should build interest in the site, and hopefully attracting more followers to your Twitter stream. The best way to do this is to log into your Facebook account, and search for “Twitter.” Add the Twitter app, as you would add any other application within Facebook. You want to make sure it is set to automatically update Facebook status when you update your Twitter account.

Now a word of warning here… When you use the standard Twitter application to update your Facebook with your tweets, it can be a bit overwhelming for your Facebook friends! They are not used to so much activity from you. The solution to that is NOT to select the standard Twitter app in Facebook, but to select the Selective Twitter App, which will only update your Facebook when you add #fb to your tweets. This puts you in control of what you ‘tweet’ on Facebook.

If you tend to be on MySpace a lot, you can use the application Twitter Sync to synchronize your MySpace status with Twitter. I personally have a MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. Some of my friends belong to only one of the three networks, and it gets hard to keep up with everyone.

This way you can link your Facebook with Twitter and use MySpace’s Twitter Sync to reach everyone at once. After updating your status on MySpace, you can use Twitter Sync that posts my update to Twitter which will post my update to Facebook. Now you only have to update once to reach multiple audiences.  Twitter also enables you to link your updates with your website or blog by a Twitter-generated JavaScript that automatically includes your recent updates.

Advantages in using Twitter can be discovered on a daily basis.

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.

Twitter is the greatest thing to come around the Internet in years. I had never been on the leading edge of technology acceptance – before Twitter. I did Usenet News after it had long gotten past its prime, slept through the World Wide Web. Blogging ? Set up my own online diary ? Why would anyone do that ? But Twitter does it all. Social computing. Online news and views. Bulletin boards. Twitter can do it all. It is my interface to everything I’ve done online for the past twenty years. It is east to join and easy to use. And, most importantly, Twitter is free.

Twitter is a model of user friendliness because it does functionality right. You get started right away and you can learn as you go. For an old guy like me, that’s important, because I still remember VHS and Betamax, but never had the patience to program my Video Cassette Recorder, and I still remember learning to type using Multimate on a Compac PC that ran DOS. No, not MS-DOS, just DOS. If you throw too much functionality at me too fast, a man my age cannot absorb it all, but with Twitter, I can keep up with the youngsters, even get ahead of them. I’ve recruited one of my three daughters for Twitter – they all had Facebook pages – and managed to get one other’s long dormant Twitter account linked to mine, I’m a low frequency blogger, so what I typically do is just manually insert the links to my blog entries as I update my site. I have cross-linked my Twitter page to Facebook.

For me, the most important and attractive feature of Twitter is to act as a “one-stop shop” for web browsing. I’ve linked many news services, including BBC, the New York Times, Die Zeit, and CNBC’s Fast Money onto my Twitter feed. Usually, I’ll log on before going to bed, to check out what is happening. I reserve Favorites for specific items I want to keep, and if I need to know more, I’ll go to the owning website. I discovered that the Onion News Network is up on Twitter, always a favorite. There are also a number of government sites linked into Twitter, including the White House. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin also have sites linked to Twitter, so if you want to know where Newt is having dinner this evening, check it out. I’ve been a little hesitant to tweet at work, since our office operates in a secure intranet and it might be taken wrongly – but Twitter does have enormous potential for business intelligence gathering. Just a few days after joining Twitter, I came across a very interesting project that was announcing its open solicitation just the day before.

Again – the power of Twitter is that it gets you to where you want to go on the information superhighway without getting stuck in traffic. That’s what we all need don’t we?