Twitter.com What is the deal?

[Puffin]

Can someone tell me how twitter.com works and why do people like it so much.

[sephjnr1]

It's a dumbed down Facebook that people use to tell their friends what they're doing at the moment, often using mobile phones. Best used by people with far too much time on their hands.

Like me.

[Mr. Grinch]

its for sad 40+ who have nothing to do or noone to talk to

all you do is keep updating your page with what your doing but you only have 140 characters to type.
and people can follow you and see what your day is happening in your day.
its popular with some celebrities too they have most followers

[shallowtwig340]

i know !!
what the helll people !! it boring as xx
am i the only one in the world that thinks this is just another way you can spy on ur fwends !!
itz true

[bms]

It's for semi-important busy people to feel like their important because other people with boring lives want up to the second updates on what they are doing.

[SRM_UK]

You're right blonde. Never understood what all the fuss was about, clearly its for people that have more interesting lives than me if they can write stuff on it all day long, or for people that think they care what they had for lunch lol.

[nic1h1]

im a member but its sooooo bad!!! and doesnt work with my phone anyway lol!!! a lot of celebs on it though!!! probably a lot of fakes too!!

[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.