Can somebody please explain what twitter actually is?

[Alicia W]

I know i sound like a total social retard asking this, but what is twitter? I don't actually understand what you do on it. Is it anything like facebook?

My friend was on twitter the other day during my I.C.T lesson and i was looking at her 'followers'. She had 500, but none of which she actually knows in real? She also has contact with celebritys... apparently.
Ahhh it's soo confusing X(

[Runs With Scissors]

Its a stalker's wet dream come true.

[Blue]

twitter is when you can see what and where your friends are going (followers) and you can see what your favorite celebrities do to know more go on twitter and maybe they have videos or just type in google something about twitter and it ill help you

[i am 132]

It's a site where you update whatever you want and you can follow anyone you want and you won't need them to accept your request or whatever unless they have their account locked, private. It's much simpler than Facebook. It's also a place where people update more than on Facebook. And yeah you can contact your favourite idols and make friends with strangers. Just tweet them, they might reply. It's all fun. I can't live without Twitter.

[kate]

twitter is twitter. you can understand like this twitter is a kind of tiny blog. you can write anything you like in short senteces.

[i]

So, Twitter is basically nothing like Facebook (well, it's a social networking site but... different).

On Twitter, you make an account. You can provide a photo, self-description and email that is all available to the public. Then, you can 'find' people. Usually, people have names that are not their real, actual name (as you can't have any spaces in it), unlike Facebook. So instead of 'John Smith', you might write, 'JohnS-123'.

So, back to finding people. You can search for them, and when you first set up an account you can select your interests and Twitter will recommend people. An example might be that you select, "News", and it will recommend a local, international or national news broadcaster for you to follow based on your location. Oh, and they don't have to accept you. And it's only one way, so if you follow them they don't necessarily follow you. Got it?

Now, onto following. Following people means that you 'subscribe' to their news feed (kind of like Facebook). On the main menu (when you are logged in), you will get all their 'Tweets' (onto that in a moment!). So you get a news feed like Facebook. Cool? . Now, there's such thing as 'Followers' and 'Following' on your account. 'Followers' are people who follow you (so they selected you - it's only one way!). 'Following' is who you follow. Unless you're Lady Gaga, you usually have more under 'Following'.

Okay, now Tweets. Tweets are what you write (if you only want to receive tweets, that's okay too, you don't need to write anything!) to any of your followers. So, you can only use 140 characters, around 1-3 sentences. You can tweet links, photos (on photo sharing sites) or media. The links will be shortened so you can write a tweet without the link taking up all the characters. Now, there's also something called a 'hashtag' (#). These are tags that you can use so that people can search for the word in your tweet. So, if you were talking about the iPhone 5, you could say, '#iphone5' so that people would find your tweet easily (as I said, it's publicly available). And there's also the 'at sign' (@). This is used to talk about people (it will become a link, like how Facebook does it automatically if you type someone's full name). So you could talk about Steve Jobs by saying, @SteveJobs. He will see this in his profile under 'Mentions'.

And I think that's all! Sorry about the length, I really wanted to help you. Oh, and about your friend - most people follow celebrities and have a lot of people who they follow. Also, what you tweet about... Well, if you were talking about, say, MasterChef, you would say something like, "#OMG, @Hayden_Quinn got eliminated from #MasterChef!!!!!". See how I used # for a thing/ non person, and @ for a person? That's what you do. Hope I helped!

[Best.Ans]

1) stop trolling
2) go outside
3) ????
4) PROFIT!!!!