What is this Twitter thing all about?

You will probably have heard about Twitter and you might have heard that it's a micro-blogging site, that it's a social networking site, that it's the fastest growing phenomenon in the world of the internet...

All these are correct but they don't really tell you anything useful.

Here is a brief attempt by the EMIS Learning Centre to help you understand what Twitter is and how it can help you.

Getting Started

Firstly, you can join for free, you just have to go to www.twitter.com to create an account, invent a name for it which is not already being used and give it a password.

Now you have an account, you need to find people to 'follow'. This means that anything they have to say (called 'tweets') will pop up right on your Twitter home page.

Anyone with an account can post a comment up to 140 characters.

This makes Twitter an excellent way of getting succinct bites of information without having to plough through pages of blogs. Most tweets include links to web pages, photos, videos etc. which you can click like any other link on a web page.

Some of the links will look odd (something like http://tinyurl.com/yzg3hh4 or http://bit.ly/5gwZxZ) because the twitterer has used a special tool to condense a long web address (URL) into something much shorter. Remember the 140 character limit on tweets?

So who would you want to follow?

Many tweets are just 'what I had for breakfast' type comments and would only have any meaning to friends.

However, there are a lot of professional organisations who tweet regularly, either as an organisation or as an individual within the oranisation. For example, at EMIS we have two main twitterers, the Learning Centre (that's us) and EMIS News (our Marketing people). However, lots of individuals also tweet, from our Managing Director on down.

You can follow organisations like E-Health Insider or NHS Choices, celebrities such as John Cleese or Lady Gaga, brands like McDonalds or businessmen such as Richard Branson or Duncan Bannatyne. The list is enormous and it all depends on what you are interested in.

Following us

If you decide to follow us, you'll get hints and tips on EMIS products, reminders on online learning sessions, updates on training sessions we think you might be interested in and more. We tweet several times a week but it only takes a few moments to check.

Tweeting yourself

If you decide you want to tweet yourself, it couldn't be easier - just type your text into the 'What's happening' box on your Twitter home page.

If you really start to want to tweet regularly, there are many free software packages that make it easier. We use Tweetdeck, but do a bit of research as there are many with different features depending on what you want to do.