Twitter…do you know what it is? If not, you may want to know pretty soon as you don’t want to be the last one to know a new social media trend!

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

Yeah, maybe it use to be “techy” or “geeky” but it has become more popular than ever, has started to become mainstream, and will continue to become even more popular all around.

They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks. Twitter Blocks is a real-time visualization tool for recent updates from a user’s friends and their friends’ network of friends (and their friends’ friends’ network of friends, etc.).

Another interesting aspect of Twitter is Twitter Packs, which is list of areas of interest or locales, and you can self-select people you know who would be (in your estimation) someone others might follow. Maddie Grant posts this list in the idea of associations to jump on board and use Twitter for their members. I think its genius!

So why not? Go grab an account and start twittering!

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