Twitter is a website service for social networking and micro blogging. The posts people make on Twitter are known as tweets, and are usually short text posts with updates on what is going on. The updates are shown on a user’s profile page and are also sent to those people that are signed up to receive them.

So, we added the Twitter link so that folks using Twitter could receive updates from the message board if they wanted to… sort of similar to keeping up with the message board via the RSS feed.

--Islander

Islander: I don't get it. I watched the video at twitter.com and I clicked the icon above. I didn't see what anyone was doing??? And what is the RSS feed?? I see that icon on various pages.

East Ender, I read Islander's response, and my eyes just glazed over. I suppose it's nothing to concern a low-tech like me. LOL

Islander, thanks for the response and explanation, though. I like that "twitter" and "tweets" terminology. Sounds so avian; much friendlier sounding than "RSS feed," which totally intimidates me.

Gerie: I looked at the Twitter website. They have a little cartoon movie that explains that you can write short messages telling your friends what you are doing? Huh? I'm typing on my keyboard? *-)

My guess is that Twitter would be useful for people who do a lot of text messaging to each other, and this would allow you to make a brief update about yourself available to a group of people instead of having to send individual text messages. It seems very counter-intuitive to the island lifestyle. If you want an update on me, lets meet at a beach bar like Fungi's and we'll share life stories over a bucket of Corona's 😎

If you know what facebook is, and know what the 'status' option is -- it's basically just that.

East Ender, you noted the main thing of Twitter. So if you were twittering you could write 'heading off to work' or 'going to the beach'. Updates on your status/or what you are doing like Eric mentioned. However it has become something more, it serves as a way to aggregate information from different places and people into one place.

News agencies feed their headlines to their twitter page, the feed shows the headlines with a link to read the whole article. Some news agencies have incorporated comments made on twitter regarding news into their reporting. Businesses can use it to send information about their products, sales, specials to their followers on twitter. Some bloggers use it submit a feed for their regular blog entries plus other comments for generating feedback.

We aren't using it at this point to answer what we are doing but as a way to provide a feed for the message board, similar to the way the news agencies feed their headlines.

A twitter user could follow friends, CNN, a message board, blogs, etc... When they go to their personal page they would see the updates from all of those in one place.

Hope that helps it make more sense.

RSS feed allows aggregating information into one place. We have an RSS feed for the message board and lots of sites (news, blogs...) have RSS feeds. You can subscribe to those you are interested in and get the feeds sent to one place (via an RSS reader on the web, on your desktop, mobile device...) for you to review and follow up on.

--Islander

Only problem is Twitter hasn't figured out a way to monetize it yet so who knows how long they will be around before they run out of VC cash..