Get started with Twitter

If you've wondered why people are Tweeting or following Stephen Fry, it's because they're talking about Twitter, the latest way to communicate online.

Once you've signed up to Twitter, you can post messages describing what you're up to or share links. Each message is limited to 140 characters, so Tweets, as they are known, are brief and concise.

Rather than trying to read every single message posted to Twitter, you can follow people to see their updates. In turn other people will follow you to see your updates.

Twitter doesn't charge any subscription fees so let's sign up now.

Visit www.twitter.com and click on the green Get Started – Join! Button.

Fill in the form on the next page, starting with your name. Enter your preferred user name and Twitter will check whether it is available automatically. Then enter a password – this can and should include numbers and special characters such as a pound sign.

Enter your email address to receive updates when people send you messages. It's up to you whether you want to receive updates from Twitter. Finally, enter the text shown in the box and click on the Create my account button.

You can opt to enter your email details into Twitter so it can check your address book in case your friends are already registered. We're not going to do that, so we clicked on Skip this step.

Twitter offers a selection of people to follow, select them if you want and then click on the Finish link.

You will now see your personal Twitter homepage. This will show all of your updates and those of the people you follow.

To create a message, click in the box at the top and start typing. A countdown shows how many characters are left while you do this. Click on Update when the message is finished and it will appear in the main part of the window, where other people's updates will appear

Now, let's follow someone. You can search for other people by clicking on the Find People link or, if you know their Twitter user name, you can enter it into the browser address bar.

For example, enter www.twitter.com/computeractive in the browser's address bar to see updates from the magazine website.

The Computeractive Twitter page should be displayed. To see these updates on your Twitter page, click on the Follow button.

To find people to follow, look at who they are following. In the case of Computeractive, this is a list of the editorial team.

Click on the Following link on the right to see a list. You can see a short biography for that person by hovering the cursor over their name. Then click on the Follow button to see their updates.