The Twitter homepage

Apparently it’s the next big thing, celebs are on it, corporations are on it, and now so is the Students’ Union.. but what is it?

Is it easy to do? Ridiculously so. Log on to twitter.com, open an account, and seconds later you can tweet.

What’s a tweet? A 140-character posting, resembling Facebook’s status updates (where it asks: What are you doing right now?). If 140 characters aren’t enough for your profound musings, just tweet again.

Who reads it? Whichever fellow tweeters choose to “follow” you. You can also “follow” other users. This becomes your “friend” network.

Is it live? Yes. Posts are loaded in real time, so you can communicate instantaneously. Hostages trapped in the Oberoi hotel during the Mumbai attacks, for example, posted Twitter messages that detailed the chaos as it happened

How do I do it? From a phone or a computer.

Yes, some people ‘tweet’ the most boring things and so… I just choose not to follow them. But there are some gems to follow such as:
• Stephen Fry @stephenfry – Presenter, actor, and writer
• Jonathan Ross – @wossy – TV presenter and Radio DJ
• Graham Linehan – @glinner –TV director and writer (Father Ted, IT Crowd etc)

It’s not just for ‘stalking’ celebs though and has found new itself at the forefront for reporting real time events such as the recent fires in Australia, or the Mumbai attacks mentioned above.

We, the Students’ Union are using Twitter as another way of keeping in touch with you, our students, and letting you know what’s happening on a daily basis as opposed to UNIfied or the website which generally report news once it’s happened, so if you’d like to follow us then visit www.twitter.com/christchurchsu.

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