Twitter

Twitter is not a blog. It is often referred to as a micro-blog service, which covers its role as an information sharing service. Many people mistakenly believe that Twitter is a social network, which may be how it was originally intended, but is not what it has evolved into today. Twitter's main use this day and age is the propagation of information. It allows corporations and governments to send information out quickly and easily to the people who use their services, as well as giving them a very public way of responding to concerns and criticisms. It brings, for better or worse, authors (a large portion of twitter users) and other creators in closer community with their fans. Communities organize around it, protests a facilitated by it, and it - along with Facebook - played a substantial role in organizing and making public the events of the "Arab Spring".

The difference between Twitter and regular blogging is the fact that it limits each post to 140 characters, which isn't a whole lot. There are some Twitter clients that support larger posts, but they do so by providing a link to the rest of the content, hosted somewhere on their servers. Generally speaking, if you want to say more than you can than in 140 characters then it is advisable to use twitter in conjunction with a blogging service and provide a link to the the longer post, with a short description of the post. Twitter is built on what has been described as a "link economy", that is, the connection between pieces of information and the way they are shared through hyperlinks and Twitter's #hashtag system.