How do you explain Twitter to a newbie?

Sometimes, the most difficult social websites in the world seem to be easy to understand. It takes a little while for us to understand how Facebook work.  It takes us a little while to understand how WordPress works.  So are Digg, Delicious, Friendster, and even Gmail, Hotmail, and so on.

Twitter is something that is so simple, that the normal people will not even understand why a person want to tweet.  And why they want to tweet.  Long time ago, there are friends who ask why there is a need to blog… Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing… And in the end, some of the greatest websites out there are using blog!

So what is twitter?

Twitter is a small little blog for you to post 140 characters.  You can’t really write a lot of things at one shot.  Only a short sentence telling people what you are doing.

Does Twitter really matter?

For those who don’t use Twitter, they will think it is a waste of time.  Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing with your dog?  While there are a lot of people out there who really tweet a lot of messages which seem to be wasting time, they must think again why people are using it…

It’s really not easy to understand until you use it for quite a while yourself.

So what are you doing?

This phrase “What are you doing” doesn’t have to mean what you are doing literally.  We get to see different places adopting the same kind of “What are you doing” such as Facebook and Tumblr.

“What are you doing” can be about any of the following:

• twittering (broadcasting) promotional messages to your followers.
• twittering (logging) the status of your health, your plant, your grades, your height, your weight, your sleeping habits and so on.
• twittering (announcing) your new blog post to your followers.
• twittering (reporting) the happenings that everybody is concern about.
• twittering (socialbookmarking) the great URLs out there who catches it.
• twittering (greeting) to the whole world a very good morning instantly!
• twittering (rumbling) about who should be the latest American Idol.
• twittering (chatting) with your followers about what you have been doing and asking them too.
• twittering (interviewing) with a celebrity online where everybody can sit and listen to the interview, while giving their comments and questions which may or may not be answered.
• twittering (question) the world why is it like that? How is it like that? When is it like that?  It’s like an instant search engine with a personalized answer!
• twittering (telling) the world what you are really doing right now (which is kind of boring to listen to as your followers)

What’s next after telling the world?  Search it!

You will want to hear the valuable information that the world has to tell you about.  You can instantly do a search of the twitter messages to find out what the world is talking about with your selected keywords.

Search is a very powerful tool on twitter.  It may even be taking the place of Google search engine because Twitter messages contain both human voices as well as website links which are relevant to your search.  The web results that come up is determined by human beings, and it is searching based on the latest trends.

Extendable Twitter!

And with so many 3rd party websites out there making use of Twitter API (stands for “Application Programming Interface”), you stand to gain a lot as a twitter user.  Have a good look at what twitter apps are out there.

With the extended applications, you will be able to turn those twitter messages around the world into a goldmine.  A place where you can do a lot of research and finding out for your industry.

What else do you want from Twitter?

Twitter is really just a simple application where it logs our messages at 140 characters.  Though this cap may limit the way how Twitter can expand, it also helps to keep Twitter simple to use and understand the messages.  There have already been too much information out there, all we want is really a short and sweet message to read about.

So to all newbie out there, do you still understand what Twitter is?