What is Twitter all about?

By now you must surely have heard of Twitter. Some people are addicted, others loathe it, and the majority of messages you can read through this service are as inane as the name. But that is part of its charm for Twitter users and one of the main reasons why it has taken the online world by storm.

There are 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 opened Twitter accounts in order to inform fans of their every thought and movement.

What is Twitter and how does it work?
Twitter is a mixture of a social networking service and a micro-blogging service. It allows users to post and read updates on any topic from personal musings to news snippets.

It is easy to set up a Twitter account and it is free. It is best to use your real name so that people you know can find you easily.

Postings can be made private so that only friends that the user has authorised can see them. However, updates can also be made public so that you can be found and generate a list of followers you don’t know as well as ones that you do. If you are a dedicated fan of a celebrity then you can choose to follow them. 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.

As with most known social networking sites, the settings page lets users customise the look of the profile page for example by adding a photo or linking to their mobile phone.

A Tweet community
Twitter has also spawned its own language. Users are variously called Twitters, Tweeters or 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, no bad thing. However, there is nothing to stop someone posting updates one after another if they want to get a longer message across.

The updates are placed on the user’s profile page and 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 SMS, RSS feeds, social networking sites such as Facebook and various widget applications such as Twidget.

Twitter has been credited by some as providing an essential tool to break news stories. Indeed ‘citizen journalists’ have broken news stories using Twitter before the professional news agencies, enabling journalists to pick up on stories they may have had to wait for on the news wires.

Twitter was credited with being the first to break the news about the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York recently – one of the passengers posted a 'tweet' about it together with a picture taken on a mobile phone.

Our verdict
Twitter is just the latest online application that has tweaked people’s interest. For the lazy blogger – someone who doesn’t have time to devote to a traditional blog – it offers huge scope.

It is a way of staying in touch with groups or friends or can be used merely as a gossip channel. But as with any online application, it does have its drawbacks. Although a great many celebrities have signed up and have a devoted following of fans, unscrupulous users are posing as celebrities.

Accounts have also been hijacked by hackers and it has been used to launch phishing attacks. So as with everything be careful and if you receive an update that seems dubious ignore it. Also remember that libel laws exist for online posts if you post a scathing update.

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 by the snow.

To access our ‘tweets’, click here. To read our ‘tweets’, click the name of the team member you want to follow. It’s as simple as that. If you want to stop following us, click our profile photo followed by the grey button labelled ‘Following’ and select 'Remove'. If you want to post your own messages, you’ll need to register – and it’s free.