What is Twitter and what is it good for?

[catdogpigduck]

[G. Whilikers]

Think of Twitter as a cross between text messaging and micro-blogging (keeping a journal with very short entries). You can put messages in through the web site, through cellular text messaging, or by IM. Other people can read your "tweets" at your Twitter home page or subscribe to automatically receive everything you say. (You can change privacy settings to control who gets what.) You can also subscribe to other people's tweets.

What it's good for is another matter. It's been used for just chatting, for spreading news socially, and it's been put to good use with the recent San Diego wildfires and reports from the Mars Phoenix lander.