“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!

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.