Why to Twitter?

Lately, Twitter has become very popular in the Web 2.0 community, and its popularity made me curious and triggered my research on it. Initially, I perceived Twitter as a social networking community, such as Orkut, Facebook; however, Twitter's utility sets it apart from the other popular communities available on the Net.

Wikipedia defines Twitter as the Internet Messaging Service that allows you to send SMSs through the Internet. Now, don't think of it as one of those popular Internet messaging services through which you can send SMSs to your friends for free. Instead, Twitter offers you a platform to update your current course of action and make that update available to a large group of people just by clicking a button. It terms the updates as Tweets that are 140-character long text messages posted by you on your Twitter profile. Anybody who is following you in Twitter is able to view your Tweets.

Through Twitter, your messages gain a global and wide reach without much of effort and resources. In addition, Twitter integrates with your mobile phone so you can continue posting tweets from anywhere and at anytime by using your mobile phone.

At the same time, the service provides its users the freedom and the flexibility to control access to their tweets by providing the liberty to block followers. Also, you can opt to send private/personal messages to individual followers instead of sending tweets to everyone. Then, you hold the complete authority to hide your tweets from anonymous users who are probably not following you.

The other networking communities probably are far more cluttered and loaded than Twitter because they serve a completely different purpose. Twitter, on the surface, is not loaded with numerous features and that's because it wants you to focus only on updating your friends about your latest activity.

I'd like to use Twitter to update my friends about my latest research/finding. For example, how can I update everyone about this post and request their feedback on it? Through Twitter. Just one update and everyone will know about this post.

This is just the basic utility that Twitter serves. To know and use more, read the following article:
http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-you-can-use-twitter/

Looking forward to your comments!