“Twitter” I’m sure most of us have heard the term somewhere, A friend may say, “tweet me later.”or you may hear it on the news since most TV stations seem to be getting into the whole social networking scene.

You’ve also probably heard someone say “Oh, I’m following them!” because yes, you CAN follow Celebrities, TV stations, Stores, Your favorite video game, Sports team, even… The President.

Basically its used to keep people up to date with ANYTHING going on in the world in real-time.

These updates are called “Tweets.” What is interesting about Twitter is that you can scroll all the way to the bottom of any page and search for people who are “tweeting” about topics that interest you! For example, if you type in Iphone you will receive “tweets” posted as soon as one second ago about the Iphone! It’s great for keeping up to date with music, movies, and current events!

Also, Twitter has a Trending Topics side bar on almost every Twitter page. It shows you what topics are popular and you can click any link in the side bar and be brought a search of the topic.

Twitter also gives you the option to refresh the page is someone tweets about that topic while you are already looking at the most up to the second tweets! A great feature!

You may be curious to what it means when someone “Retweets” something. Well, the art of retweeting is simple, it is basically just taking reposting something someone else has already posted, and giving them credit for the original post (tweet.) Most users put Retweet: before the actual post then credit at the end by using @ then the original posters name. Sometimes Twitter users use RT instead of Retweet, or sometimes they use “Retweeting” and then the post. Retweets are a lot of fun and can get you a lot of followers!

You can also send specific messages on twitter to one user to make sure they see what you have to say by typing @ and the user name of the person you wish to tweet. Example @Starrla88 Hey missed you today! or something along those lines.

Currently, two people who I follow on twitter are competing in a race to 100 followers, this is a fun idea between friends. Both are sitting around 60-65 followers, It will be interesting to see who will win because both are constantly neck and neck and fighting for people to follow one and not the other.

If you aren’t currently into the Twitter scene, you should check it out, especially if you own a small business you can promote yourself with Twitter. Or you can just use it to stay in contact and up to date on people who you care about!

Hashtags is an advanced, but easy-to-use Twitter feature. The reason they are called hashtags is because they start with a # symbol. Here are some examples: #rejectprop8, #dragmetohell, etc #rejectprop8 is a hashtag that people used when talking about Proposition 8. Users can put “#rejectprop8″ and then other Twitter users can easily find their tweets by looking at all the #rejectprop8 tweets.

Many Twitter applications, mobile and desktop, allow users to find hashtags. Some applications call them “trends” instead of “hashtags”. Most applications will keep track of the 10 or 20 most popular hashtags at any given time, so it really lets you see what people are talking about at any given time.

When the movie Drag Me to Hell came out last week (05/29/09) in the United States, many Twitter users began talking about it, and the #dragmetohell hashtag quickly jumped to the top of the Twitter top hashtag list. When looking at the #dragmetohell hashtag, I found tweets about the movie. Some contained links to reviews, some were just tweets about the user going to the movie that night, some were tweets suggesting that their friends should go see the movie, etc.

Many celebrities that have a lot of followers are very good at starting trends a.k.a. hashtags. They will post about #something and that #something will become very popular in a short amount of time. Many of their followers will begin talking about that topic and it will become widespread very quickly.

Another advanced feature is “re-tweeting” and if celebrities re-tweet tweets from their followers and those tweets in turn contain hashtags, the topic’s popularity will in a sense compound. For example, when Blink 182 member Mark Hoppus began posting about #rejectprop8, he also re-tweeted some tweets that his followers sent about #rejectprop8, and that in turn boosted the popularity of the #rejectprop8 hashtag. Soon it was at the top of the list, and Mark tweeted about how he was amazed how fast it climbed to the top of the list.

If you’re tired of reading the news to find out what’s going on, consider checking out the Twitter trend lists. Apps that let you easily follow the trend list are Twitterific, Tweetie and Twittertrend.