Twitter me this, Twitter me that

The Lemon of Pink - What the heck is Twitter?

It's a question I've heard asked everywhere from Rotary Club meetings to conversations at Tim Horton's.

With that in mind, I'm going to try and explain it all. Bear with me.

If you go to the Twitter website it will tell you it's a way to stay connected with friends, family, and co-workers. It sounds a lot like Facebook or MySpace, but what makes it different is its simplicity.

With Twitter, you get only 140 characters (letters) to make your point. Keeping it brief makes it fast and easy to use. The message people post to their Twitter feed is called a Tweet. I've seen Tweets as random as "What should I eat for dinner?" - a popular question asked by many users all day long, according to their various time zones. You never know what kind of suggestion you might get. And if you don't get any, you can always find @marthastewart and see what she's posted in her feed that day for recipe ideas.

I first heard of Twitter more than two years ago from a friend. He was writing his dissertation for his Masters degree at the London School of Economics and chose to break down the then little known social networking site called Twitter.

When he finished his dissertation he sent me a copy to read. It was thick and although I'll read pretty much anything it was also super frickin' technical. I picked it up a few times to try but just couldn't make it through. I felt bad about that, so I went to the Twitter site and signed up instead - just in case I was quizzed on it.

Once I used it a few times I noticed I was gaining 'followers' - people who added me to their Twitter feeds. I reciprocated these follows and started to build a list of my own - I currently have 142 followers, only a handful of which are real life acquaintances - most of them are news agencies and pop culture people I'm interested in for one reason or another.

In the last year Twitter has become huge, with everyone from news agencies to celebrities signing up and talking about this and that. Many Canadian media outlets use Twitter to keep people updated all day long on various events and stories as they break - which is a great way to stay informed. You can apparently also download an application for Twitter to your cellphone, but as I discussed in a previous column, I don't own one of those.

Celebrities have really done their part to make the site popular. Everyone from Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher (@mrskutcher and @aplusk), arguably the most famous twitter-ers, to the often funny and insightful John Mayer (of music fame) use Twitter to communicate with fans and with each other. Some celebrity tweets are obviously being written by managers or handlers, but you'll figure out fairly quickly if you read enough of them which are genuine and which are just form notes.

There is no 'wall' per say for people to post Tweets to each other, you simply reply. If you want to send a picture or video, there is a feature called Twitpic and video programs you can use to add links to your Tweets. These open in another screen.

The most recent buzz about Twitter is the impact it has had on information coming out of Iran after its controversial recent elections.

While much of Iran was blocked from communicating what was going on during post-election protests via the Internet and other sources, these people got word out about what was happening. They used Twitter to report the news, taking pictures and video and quickly posting them as Tweets. They became news for being able to do so. I'm sure we'll see a TV movie on this in the next two-three years.

So, this thing called Twitter could be written off as yet another distraction to our already busy daily lives or a genius and compact communication method. Who knows?

The easiest way to figure out Twitter is really just to check it out for yourself. Some might say it's for a younger, more laptop and smartphone savvy generation, but If you're interested in new technology at all or just a quick read up of what's going on in the world at large or the world from another's point of view, then it really is a neat place to go.

If you sign up, follow me @sabrinajskinner.