Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers and complete strangers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates,often called "tweets" of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or as it is sometimes called your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search and also search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Can I find my friends?
When you create an account, you can search for people by name or user name (the user name is prefixed with and @symbol), import friends from other networks, or invite friends via email. If you don't want to do that, I for one couldn't be bothered with it, you could try to follow some of the people twitter suggests by default. Once you've found your friends (old or new), follow them to start getting their updates.
What does Following mean?
Following someone simply means that you will have their Twitter updates posted into your account, or timeline. When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear on your Twitter home page. New messages are added to your home page as people post them, so you always get the updates in real time. Unless you are using a third party tool such at 'Tweet Deck' expect to be refreshing like a maniac to see if anyone you are following has posted an update. It isn't quite as automatic as the twitter team would have you think.
When you log in, you can see what the latest updates are along with general account information and the current Trends.
In terms of pure basics this is enough to get you started on your twitterverse journey. However there will be other articles covering topics such as:
- What is the 2000 follows Rule?
- How to Use Twitter?
- How to Loose Followers...
- Twittiquette (all those hidden rule for using twitter politely)
