Why are so many people using Twitter?

There are already believed to be around 12 million Twitter accounts and many more people sign up every day or just visit to read a posting. All sorts of celebrities, from actor Stephen Fry to tennis player Andy Murray, have also opened Twitter accounts.

But what does this website actually do, and what’s the point?

What is Twitter and how does it work?
At its simplest, Twitter allows users to do two things: to post short messages about what they are doing, and to read other users’ updates.

It is easy to set up a Twitter account and it is free. It is best to use your real name so people you know can find you easily. Accounts can be made private so only friends the user has authorised can see them, or public so you can be found and generate a list of followers you don’t know as well as those that you do.

If you find friends on the service then you can choose to follow them and you will be shown their updates as they happen. When someone decides to follow you, an email is sent to the address you registered to let you know. Users can block people if they don’t want them as a follower. Like most social networking sites, the settings page lets users customise the look of the profile page by changing the background picture or adding a photo.

A Tweet community
Twitter has also spawned its own language. Users are variously called Twitters, Tweeters or ahem - Twits. The updates posted are known as Tweets. These posts are restricted to 140 characters so brevity is essential ­ and considering the banality of some of the updates that’s not a bad thing ­ but there is nothing to stop someone posting updates one after another if they want to get a longer message across.

These updates are then placed on the user’s profile page and are delivered to and appear on the profile pages of users who have chosen to follow that person’s updates.

For users of Twitter one of the most attractive features of this service is the range of ways these updates can be posted and received. Updates can be posted from a mobile phone and Twitter users can sign up to receive updates from people they are following via RSS feeds, social networking sites such as Facebook and various widget applications such as Twidget.

Despite the musings often being completely insignificant, Twitter has been credited by some as providing an essential tool in breaking news. Not so much by hardened hacks maybe but there are those who point out that it heralds the fact that ‘citizen journalists’ have broken news before the professional news agencies.

They argue that Twitter has allowed journalists to pick up on stories they may have had to wait for on the news wires. The site was credited with being the first to break the news about the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York after a passenger on a nearby ferry posted a picture.

Follow us on Twitter
Each member of the Computeractive team now has a Twitter account, so you can follow the thoughts of Paul, Tom, Dinah, Anthony, Tim and Andrea as we put the magazine together, meet companies, make online videos, make random observations on technology and the world in general or ­ as happened recently ­ get stuck at home because of heavy snow.

To access our ‘tweets’, go to our website's Twitter page and click the name of a team member to see what they are doing. If you join Twitter yourself and sign in you’ll also be able to follow us and receive updates automatically: simply click the grey Follow button displayed beneath each person’s photo. To stop following us, click the button again.