What is Twitter?

So I finally figured out a classification for Twitter.

First, I will say that I love Twitter, and to those people who say that Twitter is just Facebook status updates in 140 characters really don’t know what they’re missing.

Twitter is two things:

1. Twitter is a way that you can use little things called “hashtags” (Those words that have a # before them, so “#hashtag” is a hashtag) to find out what the world is talking about. Trending topics and all. It has nothing to do with telling your friends that you’re going to the bathroom or something else completely irrelevant.

2. Remember RSS? Really Simple Syndication. Remember Newsletters to your e-mail box and going through 2000 Border’s Rewards e-mails before you found your monthly bank statement? No? I might find this difficult to explain then. RSS feeds are a very small, low profile way for you to get headlines, usually right to your browser or desktop. They’re typically just an automatic link to the headline of whatever article you’re subscribing to.

At one point, I had ten RSS feeds, 8 of which were from newspapers, and every ten minutes I’d have another 15-30 things in my email box that I needed to look at. Twitter is where I keep my RSS feeds now. I never looked at all of the feeds that I subscribed to, as throughout the day, I might have 1000 articles to look at. I just typically would look at maybe 10 per day of the 1000. Twitter only keeps the most recent up at the top of my page. I don’t need to see all of the rest. You can now share your RSS feeds with other people via Retweeting.

That’s what it is. Twitter is a really simple way of getting a lot of information and discussing it with the entire world.

Have a great day.