Twitter for Beginners
What is Twitter and why would I use it?
Twitter is a Microblogging software application that is accessible online. People post comments about their activities and links to new articles or blog posts that they find interesting and helpful. Helpful in the sense ti adds to their own personal knowledgte base.The concept is based on the concept of social networking. A virtual network of link minded individuals.
Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Ever since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as “SMS of the Internet”The use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter.
Founder Evan Williams described Twitter;
” What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, but it’s an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.”
The sharing of information to create Personal Learning Networks will become clear as we walk through this tutorial.
The following is a short tutorial on how to use Twitter. It is part of the Elearning Center workshops designed to help beginners use web 2.0 tools. Please watch the calendar for details on free and low cost webinars for newbies.
