What is Twitter?

Already know what twitter is? Great – link up with @travelcwb or retweet a post you like …

Not a clue? Read on for a Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.

 

Twitter: In its Simplest Form

 Twitter has been called many things – a microblogging platform, an independent force for democracy and a total and utter waste of time. I’ll leave it up to you to make up your own mind.

 What twitter definitely is, is a free service that gives you a fresh clean webpage with a twitter logo on it. You can publish things on this webpage for free as often as you like. The only catch is that your publishing efforts must be 140 characters or less (around the same length as a text message).

 

Why would anyone want to do that?

No good reason, if you stop there. Twitter’s strength lies in the way you drop in and out of other people’s twitter streams (the name for those webpages we just talked about.) It’s like a real-time global conversation – except you can filter out the bores without pretending that you’ve finished your drink or that you need to go to the toilet.

 

So?

 My take on the twitter phenomenon is that it’s a cross between chatting with friends, colleagues, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama,  and browsing the newspaper headlines to see which article to read (you can link to another website in your 140 character tweet.)

 

A few examples related to planning a cheap weekend break.

 

Get Inspired

Follow @travelcwb on twitter and you’ll get free updates on what’s happening here at Cheap Weekend Breaks as well as the latest information about other exhibitions, special deals and resources that I think might be useful.

Of course, it’s not all about meeee! You can ‘follow’ (the word for subscribing on twitter) tweets from the National Trust to Time Out London and more.

 

Get Informed

This morning, I was researching a trip to the Arabian Baths in Seville. I mentioned that on twitter – and within a few minutes someone had given me the link to the site. Could I have found the information another way? Of course, although it would have been slower. Similar thing when I headed to Valencia for the crazy tomato throwing festival. A quick tweet (the word for your 140 characters) and I had top tips coming my way.

 

Get going

Ready to dabble in the twitterverse but the hashtags (#), RTs and DMs make it all look like gobbledegook?

Don’t worry about that. You can either get started and worry about it later or wait for my next post in this series.

 

Just one word of caution – consider anything you publish on twitter as public property. Forever.