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?

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?

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.