Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."
The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service,
allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides
relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated
method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn't
normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts
to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.
You can send your messages using the Twitter website directly, as a single SMS alert, or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter, or the Twitterfox add-on for Firefox. (See below for links to Twitter tools and applications.)
Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each of your followers, and in the Twitter public timeline (unless you disable this in your account settings.)

You can receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, IM, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application.
For more information about what Twitter is all about, see:
Twitter has many uses for both personal and business use. It's a great way to keep in touch with your friends and quickly broadcast information about where you are and what you're up to. For example, "I'm downtown and aching for some sushi. Anyone like to join me?"
For business, Twitter can be used to broadcast your company's latest news and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy internal collaboration and group communication.
To learn more about how you can make use of Twitter, see:
Visit the Twitter website and click "Join for free" to create your account. Consider using your real name as your user name to help your friends find you more easily.
Once your account is created, login and click "Settings." From here, you can setup your account details, manage your password, register your mobile phone and IM account, configure how you receive Notices, upload your photo and customize your account's design.
Your Twitter page is located at twitter.com/your-username
You can "tweet" from your Twitter page, your mobile phone, IM account, or via a third-party Twitter client.

Your tweet will be displayed to your followers, either on their Twitter page, mobile phone, or any other way they are setup to receive Twitter updates.
Finding and adding friends to your "Twitterverse" is easy.

See the Twitter website for a complete reference of Twitter Commands.
When you send a message with @username at the beginning, it's understood that your message is intended for that specific user, and while these won't be displayed on your Twitter page, all your followers can still see the tweet. (Note that for the intended recipient to see your message on their home page, they must be following you, otherwise they will only see your message on the Replies tab.)
To send a friend a private tweet, use the Direct command: d username message.
The following blog posts are aimed at bloggers and other professionals who would like to use Twitter for business.
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An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Film reviews by twitter users.
@twanslate is a Twitter Bot capable of translating anything you throw at it. Great for on the go translation when all you have is your phone.
Twiddict, a new Twitter support service, allows users to check whether Twitter.com is up and running or not. As soon as Twitter is back on its feet, Twiddict sends the users a message letting them know is well once again in Twitterland. While the site is
Twitzu is a new Twitter application that makes creating events and sharing them with your Twitter world a breeze.
Twizon is a Twiiter + Amazon mashup. Twizon lists all the tweets referencing Amazon deals. Find out what’s popular, and where to get it.
MadTwitter is a Windows application that lets you read “twits” written by your friends and publish your own. It’s inspired in Twitterrific, a really nice application for Mac.
Twitscoop helps you stay on top of twitter's hot topics or discussions. Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Clo
Allows you to create a "board" showing you all the tweeters you want to see at once.
Twitag is a #tag finder for Twitter, facilitating and organizing the most recent content tagged by users.
TweetLists organizes the most recent links found on the public timeline on Twitter based on various criteria.
TweetSmart is a real–time, ever–evolving link blog and running commentary on the best of the Web.
Twellow.com collects, analyzes, and categorizes tweets, creating niche-specific categories that you can search to find Twitter users with similar interests.
Receive updates from FriendFeed, send and receive tweets with Twitter, and post photos to Flickr all from one desktop app.
Find up-to-the-second tweets about a given topic, then analyzes the attitudes expressed in those tweets, and displays them using colors, providing an at-a-glance view of sentiments expressed on Twitter.
Schedule future-dated tweets, auto-follow and send automated notes to new followers.
Directory of Twitter applications, organized categorically, with user comments.
People post links in their twitter feed. We grab 'em, visit 'em, count 'em, score 'em and list 'em. Since we only show the latest tweets, this list changes constantly. Very much a "what's buzzing" on twitter.
Enter a Twitter user name and get taken directly to their page.
Twitter + Autoresponder. Setup unlimited messages to be delivered to your twitter page when you want.
Desktop application that allows you to send and receive to/from FriendFeed and Twitter.
Intwition watches internet chatter to discover breaking news and the topics people are talking about.
Get your lifestream on your desktop. Post videos, images or text messages to twitter, friendfeed and flickr.
Doesfollow is a simpler way to find out if someone is following you on Twitter.
Your Twitter Ratio is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). It is measured with the TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio). The higher the ratio, the more Twitter heat you pack.
Realtime tracking of Twitter hashtags.
Terraminds micro is a search application for Twitter messages and users.
Input two Twitter user names and see their conversation via @ replies!
Allows you to create and direct message your own groups by simply stringing together twitter usernames with the plus sign (twapper?u=user_a+user_b+user_c)
Tag your followers into different groups, then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time
Tweeq is a little Twitter application that allows you to discover which cliques, aka tweeqs, you or anyone else is a part of in Twitter.
Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you'd like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day, available as both a webpage or as an Atom.
Tweetcube allows you to share files on Twitter. Blast out your images, videos, music and more with just a couple of clicks.
Be the first to know who's twittering about you, your products, your company, or your website. TweetBeep.com gives you twitter alerts by email when a tweet matches your search.
Twitpress is a wordpress plugin which submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog.
Send virtual gifts to your Twitter friends.
The unofficial Twitter community and forums.
Create lists with Twitter.
Connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar.
LoudTwitter posts to your blog your daily tweets.
HelloTxt enables you to update your status across all of your social networks and microblogs--including Twitter--with a single click.
Search Twitter conversations in real-time and discover what people are talking about right now.
TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends' statuses of Twitter.
Where the community recommends fellow Twitter users by topic of interest or geographical area.
Temporarily unsubscribe from chatty Twitter Friends.
Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. There are other services, like Twitterposter, that base influence on how many followers you have.
A Twitter users directory.
Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter or Pownce.
Twitter + Google Maps mashup that displays latest tweets in your geographic area.
Twitterrific is a Mac application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website.
Top 100 Twitter users.
Twitterverse is a mashup and visualization project which mines and archives the data from the public timeline of Twitter and provides a visualization of the most commonly used words in a given time period.
A service that enables you to take a twitter tweet to tumblr or embed in other pages/blogs or send to email. tweetshots are tweet screenshots, automated.
A content filtering service that tracks and follows the latest popular links, conversations and people on Twitter.
Easily Twitter any event, conference, or meeting in real-time, and then reuse the coverage in a blog post, email, newsletter, etc.
See trends in Twitter, find out what is hot and what people are saying about it.
Send private Twitter messages to specific groups of friends.
Twubble searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.
A Flash application that displays your friends and followers with pagination, sorting and filtering functionality.
An easy way to turn your Twitter-verse into a grid view. Visualize your conversations in a clean layout.
Make a word cloud from a public Twitter stream.
Find new friends on Twitter who share similar interests.
Create surveys for the twittersphere.
Graph your Twitter stats, including tweets per hour and per month, and tweet timeline.
Generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out Tweets around a certain geographic area.
Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.
Create a group twitter feed for your company, industry or community.
Feed your blog posts to your Twitter account automatically.
Real-time Tweitter analytics.
Real-time search engine for Twitter.
A desktop client for twitter, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
Real-time view of tweets overlayed on a Google Map.
Follow Twitter conversations using Quotably's clean layout.
Track keyword search volume on Twitter.
Send your Flickr photos to Twitter.
A service that lets you tweet with pictures or video, and also privately send files to your Twitter friends.
Highlight internet snippets and twitter them. On any web page you are reading, just right-click and click Twitter This!
A service that maps out where your Twitter friends are in respect to each other or a geographic landmark.
An Adobe AIR-powered Twitter client for Mac and Windows.
Pull your tweets into your WordPress blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.
Twimbler is tumble blog that gets updated via Twitter.
Inner Twitter asks what is in front of you? To answer you must stop and turn your attention to immediate reality. The Zen of Twitter.
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