The birds on the gulmohar tree outside my bedroom window twitter in harmony in the misty haze of the dawn… the clouds drift languidly across the halcyon, blue sky tinged with streaks of pink ………

Halt! Cease! Desist!.........Rewind, rewind, rewind.

Shucks, did you think this hub has something to do with our little black and blue feathered friends with glossy plumage, twittering their hearts out to attract drab female admirers?Naaaaaah!!!

This hub is to verify if YOU, like me, are new to the term, Twitter and if you too are still trying to understand what exactly a person means when they ask you if you have tweeted today. No, put your fists away. Absolutely no reason to sock the person, just because it sounds like something your dog would do on the sidewalk. Let me fill you in on whatever little I know and the operative word is, little.

A tweet is nothing but an innocuous (hopefully) text based post of about 140 characters or less. These are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them. These people are called followers. I developed an interest in Twitter, when I kept seeing it as a widget on some blogs and wondered what they were all about. In the first place it took me a long time to figure out what a widget was and even now I am not too sure, but this hub is about something else that I do not know much about so I will leave widgets for some other time. Maybe I shall write another hub on all that I do not know about widgets…just warning you ahead of time so that you can ignore it when you get the notification. This time, you weren’t so lucky…as a nature lover, you thought it was all about birds and their sweet warblings.

Well to get back…Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. It is often described as the "SMS of Internet". Twitter today is the 3^rd most used social network the largest being Facebook, followed by MySpace. However Twitter has been ranked as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. It has a growth rate of 1382%. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Now don’t we wish our economy could grow like that? The only thing to compete with Twitter is the rising rate of unemployment.

Last evening, I was desultorily chatting away with my daughter, on a number of aimless topics...the usual mother-daughter chats, when your child lives away from home and has to fill you in on what's happening in her life, so that you dont come down there to check for yourself. In the course of our ramblings, I happened to mention that I had added the Twitter widget to my blog. While congratulating me on trying to keep up with the times, she also told me she was glad to know that I was using my time so wisely. I always ignore sarcasm unless it sits right up and pokes me in the eye, so I just meekly asked her why my Tweeter widget kept saying No Updates, when I was writing so much of crappy stuff for various sites. Or was it tweaked to recognize only A grade material? There was silence from the other end and then with a long-suffering sigh, she asked me if I had been filling in the Updates on my home page. ‘You mean, I’ve got to do that stuff??’ I queried. ‘Of course’, she replied with a squeak in her voice which I knew meant that I was in for a lecture.

‘How do you expect the updates to appear on its own?’ she enquired in a voice that one usually hears a mollifying parent use with a three year old. ‘Well, I thought the internet was smart enough to find all the work I had posted and keep adding it to my updates’, I retorted. All I could hear from the other end was some snorting. Hmm…So Twitter, ain’t as smart as I thought it was.