What’s Twitter? Twitter is the new social networking phenomenon sweeping the globe.

 

Twitter is a fast growing community for social networking.

 

In essence the way it works is like instant messaging of up to 142 characters to either a selected audience or everyone in your community. Many users keep it running in the background on their desktop waiting to read whats going on or offer some advice to others.

 

You need to log in and then watch and interact with a ‘live’ online community. Think micro blogging. It started with geeks and is now spreading quicker than a winter flu to the general community especially it's seems in the workplace.

Any one using LinkedIn a corporate networking tool will be familiar with how it works. LinkedIn has recently adopted some similar functionality, alas a cut down version. For example on your LinkedIn homepage you will see a message update from someone in your network for example “John Smith is currently attending a US business conference”.  If you follow this, Twitter will be easy to master.

 

I first heard about Twitter at a well organised publishers gathering called ‘pubcamp’ which brings together some very interesting online boffins and geeks.They were doing back flips when talking about Twitter.

 

 I must admit I was a little sceptical. Just what we need another social networking gadget to slow down everybody’s work time. But since then Twitter has become the new  social networking phenomenon.

 

 According to Wikipedia in September 2008 have 5 million users a five fold increase in one month! And it’s only just tipping the iceberg, I now feel. Our lust for instant broadcasting of information and answers to inform and entertain shows no signs of slowing down.

Get use to Twitter because you will be hearing a lot more about it in 2009.

Have your say! Is Twiiter great or a waste of time?