Twitter is a social network especially created for microblogging. In this website, any registered user is able to send short messages called tweets, in a private or in a public way. If a user’s Twitter is private, only the people that he or she accepted is going to be able to read his tweets and that he/she is not going to be able to talk to anyone who is not following his or her own Twitter. Their hashtags will not count for the Trending Topic either. If it is public, anyone will have access to his tweets and the hashtags will be taken into account. So, what are these hasthags?
Hashtags are a word or group of words that go after a hash symbol (#) like #hellomonday or #Twitter. Using the hashtag, a person will be able to look for #hellomonday (for example), and the term will appear in the search engine results. Popular hashtags usually end up appearing in the Trending Topic (TT), which is a list of the most used words in Twitter in a specific moment. We can set our Trending Topic list with different options: We can see which are the most popular words Globally, just in the United Kingdom, Spain… it is up to us.
These hashtags do not last in the Trending Topic very much, but there are some that are repeated many times like #followfriday, which is in Trending Topic almost every Friday – or it used to. Anyway, they are usually never the same, as they are very popular for a few days but then people just start talking about other things. When we click in a word that is in the TT, we are able to see the Tweets of the people who have used it (unless their profile is private), which can be helpful for us to know more about that topic.
Although Twitter might at first look like any other social network, it does in fact have many different things. For example, we do not have “friends” in Twitter like in Facebook, but we have “followers”. Which is the difference? To be a friend of someone in Facebook, you have to allow them to watch your profile or you will not be able to see theirs. In Twitter, you can follow someone, but that someone will not see your profile unless they follow back. So, you can read what someone writes, but that person might not be able to watch what you write.
However, what in my opinion most attracted (young) people about Twitter was the huge amount of famous people registered. And they are not bored people pretending to be them, no, they are them, the real ones -or at least their spokesman. How do we know that they are the real celebrities? Most of them have a blue tick next to their name, which means their account is verified by the Twitter staff and we can be sure it is them. We can find almost any celebrity in Twitter, from Britney Spears to Hilary Duff, Tom Hanks or even Barack Obama.
In this social network, we can also have conversations with other people (remember: if your profile is private a person that is not following you will not receive what you tell them) just using @ before the nickname of that person. For example, if I want to talk to Britney Spears, I will have to write @britneyspears + my message. This way, my message will appear in her “Mentions” section of her dashboard.
Apart from writing hashtags, having conversations and following friends or celebrities, we can also do many other things like Retweeting. What is to Retweet? It is to take what someone said and put it in your own Dashboard (it will appear who wrote it originally) so that all of your friends can read it too even if they are not following that person. It is usually used when you agree with something or you read something interesting or funny. We can also use many applications for Twitter like Twitcam (live streaming with your web cam), Twitpic (upload your photos)… and of course, a really used application: Tweetdeck. It is a program installed in your computer so that you do not have to enter Twitter’s official page all the time. It is also possible to tweet from mobile phones or other programs.
So, to conclude, I would say that there are so many options in Twitter, and I really recommend you to go and take a look at them all.
References:
- Twitter (14:23, October 30, 2010). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10.30, November 1, 201o, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
- About us (2010). In Twitter.com. Retrieved 10.49, November 1, 2010, from: http://twitter.com/about
