What is Twitter? 

Twitter is a simple social networking tool that lets you post and/or read other people's posts. Twitter posts are called tweets and can be at most 140 characters long.  Your tweets aggregate (publicly) on your Twitter profile and are sent to other people who have chosen to follow you. 

When you login to Twitter, Twitter shows you a list of all the tweets of the people that you follow.  I, for example, follow a number of colleagues (around the world), news blurbs like UICnews, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, and various Twitter streams from vendors, special interest groups, other publications, and so forth.

A great Twitter feature is that you can selectively tell Twitter to send you the tweets from certain people or Twitter streams that you follow to your cell phone, as text messages (via SMS).  You can also post your tweets, reply to tweets or send private (direct) tweets from your cell, via SMS. Typically, I tweet from my cell, I let just a few tweets from others hit my cell (I usually read those instantly). Then, several times a day, I check the whole aggregation of tweets from everyone I follow on the Web or via various cool Twitter apps available for personal computers and smartphones.

Besides the obvious modern communication (distraction) panacea, Twitter can and is used every day for an endless assortment of applications, from instant Q&A and alarm clocks to beaming yourself into meetings and Webcasts, or getting instant foreign language translation help from abroad.

Try it out today at www.twitter.com ...or look at www.twitter.com/itl :: www.twitter.com/uicnews :: www.twitter.com/cnn :: www.twitter.com/oprah

If you have any questions or need help, contact the ITL at itl@uic.edu, 312-996-9824 or... (dare I say) tweet us at @itl ;-)

Enjoy,