It’s a micro-blogging service. There are other micro-blogging services, like Laconica and Identi.ca, but Twitter is the biggest and most well-known. You use it to submit short messages of 160 characters or fewer. This is the standard number of characters allowed in an SMS, and it’s easy to submit a message to Twitter via text message.
The nature of the messages you send is completely up to you. Most people describe things their doing or thoughts they have that they’d like to share with those that ‘follow’ them, i.e. subscribe to their messages. This can be useful for informing people if you’re going on holiday, or being evacuated from a hurricane, or publicizing how impressed you are with a new piece of technology, or a film, or the weather. Whatever.
If you use the status feature on Facebook, you’re already microblogging. My Facebook status automatically updates when I submit a ‘tweet’ to Twitter, because I don’t see the point in having them differ or manually updating them both. There are other quasi-microblogging platforms about. MSN personal messages are a good example, and if I could have that update automatically from my Twitter account too, I’d be pleased.
Some other uses of Twitter: companies and organizations can keep their customers and supporters informed of events, special offers, new products and such. My university’s computer and library services have accounts that publish details of closures, downtime and new exam timetables. If you have the know-how, you can hook up various parts of your house to automatically update their own Twitter accounts so you can, for instance, be informed of every 10 gallons of water you use, if a window has been left open, what appliances you’ve left plugged in, whether your plants need watering.
In short, microblogging is a powerful and versatile platform. Not everyone will want to use it, but I personally love it. It’s like RSS for thoughts, and its application is limited only by your imagination (and ability to keep messages short).
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