Twitter.com What is the deal?

[Malachim]

How it works depends how you want to use it, really. In essence it's a microblog, given the 140 character limit.

Ignoring the fakes, wannabes, bots and spammers and associated trash it is or can be:

a) A way of following and chatting with like-minded people

b) A way of stalking, errr following, your favourite singer/band/whatever

c) Inane ramblings of bored / drunk and/or self-obsessed people.

d) Businesses and other can and do use it for promotions. Dell for instance offer special deals on Twitter.

e) Chatting with friends instead of using txt messaging. In a similar fashion some games companies, for instance, hold conversations with players over implimenting features on a new game. Games developers to, in close knit groups, share ideas and links of interest.

Yes, a lot of it is mindless gibberish of this variety
"Made a cup of tea"
"Going back in the kitchen, forgot dunkies"
"Searching down sofa for remote"
"Off out"

That said, the same can be said of millions of blogs, websites etc.

Also, like everything else, you have to watch for fakes and scammers. The pretenders are invariably found out, ridiculed and booted out, but you still get them. The reverse can be true mind, apparently, with so called celebrities using their agents, secretaries and PR's to churn out 'tweets' to their fans. If they cared they'd do it themselves!

As for the workings, the works of it is pretty much down to:

Using @name (ie @ackadia) to name drop or mention another person on Twitter (ie Joined Twitter after @ackadia recommended it to us)

Using RT (retweet) to give credits and/or repeat something.
(ie RT The My Yahoo! team is looking for "productivity apps." Got an idea for one you'd like to build? http://bit.ly/aR7TO )

Using #word for keywords (ie Writing a blog on #watchmen if anyone is interested) (I'm not, myself, just an example.) Generally as well not to bother with this as the search engine Twitter uses works fine enough, but there you go.

And finally using:
d username message to send a private post direct to a follower (they must be following you for it to work). Can be as well to use the Direct Reply link to the left mind as this gives you a drop down list of the people following you.
(ie d ackadia Cheers mate!)

Out of interest, assuming it's not a fake (xD) Yahoo.Answers UK uses Twitter to announce questions.

One last thing, creating a custom background... Assuming most people are now moving towards bigger screens and using 1280x1024 resolution or higher (which they are) you want to create an image roughly to this size:

Dimensions: 2560x600px

This accounts for all screens up to 30" at full size and still fits within the filesize limit.

That said, depending on your design this can be reduced to around 200x300px (width by height). The reason for these dimension is this: If you are using a big screen and the background image is 1024x768 or maybe 1280x1024 it looks awful because it gets cut off.