How does Twitter work

Like any other social networking website, users have to sign up, register their phone numbers and create their own network of friends. In the terminology of the website, you ‘follow’ your friends or some celebrity while your friends will ‘follow’ you. To converse with your friends, you post a message (Tweet) and unlike email services, where you have to add the name of each recipient, the website distributes it to the entire network of people who are following you. Hence, the same message will appear in everyone’s homepage.

Twitter, as a result, can be used for addressing several people by the same message. For instance, in his presidential campaign, Barack Obama used it for publicity by simultaneously addressing thousands of people who were following him. Apart from sending messages by internet, any user can post tweets simply by sending an SMS to the Twitter phone number. The message will get posted on the tweeter’s home page and in some countries users also get updates from Twitter.