Spurred by the popularity of web-browsing cellphones such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, Twitter has seen its traffic grow 900 per cent in just one year, as politicians, celebrities, athletes and even business
leaders have made headlines with their tweets.

The online social network received four million unique visitors for the
month of February, up from 123,000 from the same month last year. It’s
a massive jump from 14th most popular social-networking site on the
Internet to No. 3, right after behemoths Facebook and MySpace. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com
blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member
Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%, Zimbio had a growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with a growth of 228%. [courtesy Wikipedia]

In this workhop we will cover the basics of Twitter so that you can feel comfortable using this tool.

Included in this workshop:

• Definitions
• Help you answer “What are you doing?”
• Disecting tweets and understanding the language
• Importance of your profile
• Following vs. Followers
• Navigating inside Twitter
• Uses and examples for Twitter
• What to do and what to avoid
• Preview to Twitter 201

Prominent users

British comedian Stephen Fry is one of the most followed celebrities on Twitter.

David Saranga of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that on December 30, 2008, Israel would be the first government to hold a worldwide press conference via Twitter to take questions from the public about the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Los Angeles Fire Department put the technology to use during the October 2007 California wildfires. Some NASA projects such as Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station provide updates via Twitter. Several 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns used Twitter as a publicity mechanism, including that of Democratic Party nominee and President Barack Obama. The Nader–Gonzalez campaign updated its ballot access teams in real-time with Twitter and Google Maps. Twitter use increased 43% on election day. The use of Twitter by victims, bystanders, and the public to gather news and coordinate responses to the November 2008 Mumbai siege led CNN to call it “the day that social media appeared to come of age.”

British celebrity Stephen Fry is also well known for having a large number of followers, and was reported in The Times as being the celebrity with the most followers on Twitter. However, the most followed celebrity today, and second overall after the CNN “Breaking News’” account, is American popstar Britney Spears^. The College of Computing of Georgia Institute of Technology and the College of Engineering of University of Texas at San Antonio have been using Twitter to send information to their students. The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna has been using Twitter for formative course evaluation.

[courtesy Wikipedia]