Twitter.com: networking site

Published 5:33 pm Friday, July 25, 2008

Pick a little, talk less: It’s easy to assume Twitter.com is for twits.

The social networking site bills itself as a way to microblog — that is, to relay the minutiae of your day-to-day life, right down to what you’re eating for lunch and when.

But while microblogging was among the site’s original intentions, Twitter has spun off in other ways. You can follow news with headlines from CNN and The Herald, for instance, or you can chat with a group of colleagues via a stream of short posts.

The site has thousands of users, including Barack Obama’s tech-savvy presidential campaign, which tosses up posts like, “Landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. Spoke earlier today in Amman, Jordan. View the video.”

Elections aside, microblogging has its benefits.

For example, say you’re flying into town, and want to let a bunch of friends know when you land. Rather than making all those calls, you send a text message or e-mail to Twitter using no more than 140 characters — that’s the site’s limit. The site notifies everyone in your network using mobile updates or the Web site itself.

Sounds like a stalker’s paradise, right? Not so fast. Like Facebook and other social networking sites, Twitter lets you control who sees the posts.

To learn more, visit www.twitter.com.

Herald staff