rcanblog

What is Twitter

Twitter is a Social Networking site like Orkut, Facebook, hi5. It can be taken as a Web SMS and you can use this as a status update tool, like you can write what are you doing? or anything which you have liked but the challenge is that you have only 140 character’s to say.

Your updates will be seen by all your followers and it will be also visible on your profile page as per your twitter account Settings (depends on ‘public’ or ‘private’). Twitter provides real time updates; means as soon as you tweet anything, it will updated across the twitter site. Considering all of the features twitter is known as ‘ Micro Blogging Website ‘.

You can create a Free Twitter account at http://twitter.com

Twitter terminology

Here is some of the terms related to twitter.

Tweet – What you have written as your latest update in twitter.
Follow – You can follow anyone and you will be able to see his/her tweets on your twitter home page.
Followers – The people those are following you, they can also see your updates on their twitter homepage.
List – List is a way to organize, you can group your followers accordingly.
Retweet – If you liked others  tweet and you also want to tweet the same then Retweet it.
For example – ‘A’ has tweeted ” I like the movie 2012“, then if you ‘Retweet’ then your status will also be updated with same phrase and your followers will see that you have retweeted ‘A’.
HashTags – Hash tags in twitter are very cool thing, in simple words it is a way to locate a specific topic on twitter. If you have used ‘Hashtags’ then it makes easy for others to search it. For example if you are tweeting anything related to Google then you can use #google in your tweet and twitter will put it on the search page of #google as might be others are also tweeting it.
Trending Topics – Trending topic are the popular topics on twitter, it means that so many people are tweeting about that specific topics

How to use Twitter

Twitter provides a very clean interface which is very simple to use. You can create your profile and twitter will provide you a unique web address ; which you can distribute to let your friends know about your twitter profile and they can follow you. It will be like http://twitter.com/username. Whatever you will tweet, it will be visible on your twitter page. Don’t worry you can make your tweets private under ‘Settings’.

Our twitter page is http://twitter.com/rcanblog.

Now if you want to write something specific to any other twitter user, use ‘@’ sign before his/her username. For example if you want to write anything to us use @rcanblog and we will be able to locate it.

How to share Video, Images or siteurl on twitter

As twitter give only 140 character’s, it is  same like 160 character’s in sms . Twitter reserves 20 character’s for your username. So what if you want to share a video or site link as it may become hard for you to share.

For this you need to use url shortner services like http://bit.ly or http://tr.im, simply put your long url there and it will short it for you which you can use at twitter. Whenever anyone clicks, it will be redirected to original page.

Final words

There are lots of twitter application available which can make your life more easy on twitter, have a look on http://twitter.com/downloads

Here we go now you are ready to use twitter, feel free to ask anything using comments.