How do you explain Twitter to someone who’s never heard of it? Here’s how I tried, in a recent e-mail to a Facebook friend. (I think I got most of it right …)

Twitter’s been around for a while now and is extremely popular. It works in a similiar way to the Facebook Status Updates, in that you can tell people what you’re doing, thinking, planning, etc., but it goes out to the whole world rather than just your FB friends. (There are settings to either restrict the visibility of your posts, so that just friends can see them, or to allow the Public Timeline to display them, i.e. to everyone worldwide.)

You can send short messages of 140 characters max via the web, or various web applications that access the Twitter interface, or even your mobile (in a number of countries), and those messages are then sent to all the users who have elected to “follow” you. Similarly, you can elect to follow other users and see all their messages — or “tweets”, as they’re endearingly called.

Incoming tweets, and the tweets you send, can be read either at your Twitter Profile page (when you’ve set one up — which is very easy), and you can also have them sent direct to your mobile as text messages if you’re away from your computer.

Here’s my Twitter Profile page: twitter.com/SomersetBob

I started using it about a year ago, then discovered FaceBook and concentrated on using that. Now I’ve sort of rediscovered Twitter and am getting back into using it again.

Several applications have been developed to interact with Twitter and display the info in various different ways. Sometimes it’s not convenient to have your Twitter page open all the time in a browser (and you have to manually refresh it to see latest tweets), so something like Twhirl, which works without a browser, is better — it automatically checks regularly to see if there are any new tweets and notifies you with pop-ups: twhirl.org

There are a few FaceBook applications designed to work with Twitter. Unfortunately, almost all of them I’ve been playing with over the past few days have technical problems!

There’s one built by the Twitter Team called, appropriately enough, Twitter, which my Facebook friends can see working in my Facebook Profile, but unfortunately the settings page is corrupted and inaccessible until someone fixes whatever’s wrong!

Another app, called TwitterVision, was originally designed to work outside FB, and they then developed an app for FB, but although it works well at its own site, this app doesn’t work properly inside FB either! (It doesn’t seem to update the box in my Profile with my latest tweets.) Try it at its own web site — it’s a map that displays many of the tweets from around the world almost as fast as they’re posted. Fun to watch!

Finally, there’s another app called FriendFeed that works inside FB and also outside.

This one’s a bit complicated to set up, but again my FB friends can see it in my FB Profile — it displays various feeds (not only Twitter) from me and my friends, and updates every time we add either a tweet to Twitter, add pics to Flickr or add other things to other social networking sites such as YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. This one seems to be working OK at present!

There you go — checking out that little lot should keep you busy for a while!

Have fun!

Those of you with w-a-y too much time on your hands might like to check out this latest addition for filling the lonely hours.

It’s called Twitter. I found it the other day by innocently following a link from a blog somewhere out there. In no time at all, I was immersed.

Twitter is a fairly simple concept, “born as an interesting side project within the offices of Odeo in March of 2006. We are a part of Obvious Corporation in the beautiful South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, California.” Its strapline is: “What are you doing?” It’s a delivery system for the kind of ephemeral comments considered too trivial for inclusion even on a blog — one-liners telling friends and (if you wish) strangers what you’re doing, quite literally, right here and now.

It’s a sort of Instant Messaging application gone mad — indeed, there’s a facility to set up your IM software to interact with it, but it’s not operational at the moment. There are also other add-ons that purport to sit on your desktop so you can Twitter without actually being on the web site — but I’ve not been able to get the one for PCs to work yet.

I first dropped in on the Twittervision map and watched with fascination as little messages from all parts of the world popped up and disappeared after a few seconds, to be replaced by other messages. The server grabs the latest messages posted in clumps, displays them one at a time, then refreshes and grabs another clump. Twitter’s recently reached what’s been described elsewhere as a “critical mass” of users and, as is usual with this kind of growth, it’s groaning under the strain until more capacity can be provided, so it’s a bit flakey at times. Still, it makes interesting, not to say addictive, viewing. I found it best to use the map’s zoom-out button until the whole of the map is displayed in one view, otherwise the map moves from left to right to left as it tries to display posts from diverse parts of the globe.

From there, I went to the Twitter home site, where curiosity got the better of me. I set up an account (free), and discovered you can post messages either from the web site, or from your mobile (network charges apply) — and, if you wish, you can opt to receive Twitter texts from your ‘friends’ and those users you are ‘following’ on your mobile too. There’s a US and a UK number you can send texts to, and these will appear on the Twittervision map too. I’ve tried this on my pay-as-you-go phone and it costs the usual (for my provider) 10p per text — or nothing if you have free texts as part of your deal. Sent texts can take a while to appear — as can some web-sent posts; everything’s a bit slow at the moment because it seems lots of new users have signed up recently owing to the growing publicity about it across the web.

You can also post messages from the web — once you’ve set up your account, you get a page of your own (mine’s here) where your posts, and those of your ‘friends’ and those you’re ‘following’ are displayed. There’s also a Public Timeline page where all messages (if the user has opted to be included in it) are displayed. (Only users who have uploaded a little pic — an avatar — are included in the Public Timeline.)

To add ‘friends’, I’ve found it easiest to watch the Twittervision map and click on the username of anyone whose posts catch your eye — you have to be quite quick, before they disappear off the screen — but when you get to their Twitter page, you can add them to your own ‘friends’ list from there. Then their posts will appear on your own page’s list of posts. It says it updates every two minutes, but I’ve found I’ve had to use my web browser’s own Refresh button to facilitate this.

It’s a bit weird really — only the other day, before I discovered it, I was idly wondering in a smokey moment whether there was a web site where people could post messages about what they were doing right there and then — I wondered whether it might show that many people across the world were doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The moment passed, I didn’t do any kind of Google search for such a site and I forgot my initial thought. A few days later — along came Twitter. Synchronicity?

Anyway, best way to figure it out, really, is to have a look!