Twitter is ...(explained in simple words)

Twitter is a tool to know what is happening right now anywhere in the world, by updating news yourself or following others who are doing so

Twitter is free to join website, you can access it using internet, mobile or desktop computer. You become member, you update your status in 140 characters or less (called as “tweets”), you can follow other users for their updates, or you can follow something called “hashtags” to follow updates on a particular topic. Please note, everything you do is visible to entire Twitter community 

Blogs helped people to express their opinions by writing public diaries, Twitter makes blogging easy by restricting it to 140 characters. Doing so, it gets you connected instantaneously, gives you the exposure, but also it may not have the depth you need at times. Most of the times, it just points you to another place on internet to get more information

People tweet about themselves to show off or let others know what they are doing (broadcast themselves), about products and services they do / do not like, events happening around like news, promotions, parties, floods, riots, etc

Brands, companies, organizations tweet to drive positive engagement with their target audience, drive promotional activity, drive online word of mouth, drive activities & news about themselves

Twitter is quick, simple and truely connecting everyone everywhere in the world. You can tweet by as easy as sending sms from your mobile. This makes Twitter a global place, where news / events can be reported and transported instantaneously around the globe as they build up

There are enough people, causes, brands, sports, good things going around the world which are newsworthy for normal internet user, this is how the “following someone on Twitter” works

Twitter HashTags are rather a technical thing. By adding "#" before any word of characters to create some kind of tag and then use that amongst a community, gives ease of searching. For example, to create a common talking topic around "Arsenal", "#Arsenal" can be HashTag and then this can be used by anyone interested in "Arsenal" as part of their status update. This then paves way to search all status updates about "Arsenal"

This is how "Arsenal" football club ranks among the top news items on weekend when Arsenal is playing

We cannot be partying all the time, we cannot be having discounts on products all the time, we cannot have football matches running all the time, we cannot have election fever all the time. So when life becomes a little non-newsworthy during the course of day or week, people start doing things for the sake of doing. And Twitter loses it significance as it cannot create or talk about news !

But again something comes up and things go around again

For businesses, it is like micro-public relations. It allows them to advertise product news, drive positive opinion about the product / services, meet real consumers and answer their questions online, activate and promote events

Asia usually follows global trends but then infrastructure becomes the bottleneck. Even though Asia has sizable mobile penetration, smart phones & mobile internet are a luxury. Wireless internet is not so widely accessible, so that everyone can log on and react to an online event. But as infrastructure or online presence improves Twitter will fly, similar to what Facebook did

Twitter changed its log in interface some time back to project it as search engine. Its ability to follow real life events in real time, adds lot of relevancy to its results

Twitter account headings appear in major search engines. Recently Bing & Google have been in news for possible tie up to have Twitter results in searches online. This can be a path breaking step, to improve the current search engines, increase mobile search & advertising market, and also to find a business viability option for Twitter from advertising revenue

As I read somewhere earlier, world is now becoming a small village. In a village, everyone knows everyone else, similar to your tweets on Twitter. But then you have something special about every person, or a community, where small groups follow each other. If someone is getting married, everyone knows, but only people close to the families attend the event. If there is something big happening in the village, like local festival or unusual visit by a celebrity everyone is upto date and gets connected

So now we are moving to that "global village" with social media and more so with Twitter