Twitter

What is twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?"by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."

What is the use of twitter?

• TWITTER ON PHOTOSHARING

Twitter’s photo-sharing and uploading service is now available to all users, Twitter has confirmed.

The feature, which made its debut in early June, allows users to add images to their tweets. Users will now find a camera icon on the bottom of the “What’s Happening?” box on Twitter.com. Clicking it will let users select a picture to upload, which they can then preview before sending it to the world. Tweets containing photos include a link to pic.twitter.com, along with a thumbnail of the attached picture. Apple’s new mobile OS prominently features Twitter integration, essentially making it the default social network for iOS users.  Twitter isn’t saying when mobile photo uploads will be available in its Android and iOS apps, but we suspect that functionality will be coming very soon.

Twitter’s photo-sharing service is powered by Photobucket, which provides all of the hosting for user-uploaded photos.

Twitter’s photo service essentially negates the usefulness of photo-sharing services like TwitPic. Twitter has come under criticism for competing with third-party services built on its platform. Developers don’t know whether Twitter will suddenly start competing with their products, an issue that has created a cloud of uncertainty over the Twitter ecosystem.

• TWITTER NETWORKING

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn't normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.

You can send your messages using the Twitter website directly, as a single SMS alert, or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter, or the Twitterfox add-on for Firefox.

Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each of your followers, and in the Twitter public timeline (unless you disable this in your account settings.)