Social Media: Twitter, Facebook and How They Have Changed the World.

It is no big secret this world is changing more quickly every day, pushed by an accelerating force that is fueled by information. Communities have always formed around this fuel like moths to a flame, with new creations and innovations emerging from the conscious examination and illumination made manifest by one’s connection to this flame. Unlike the rock-stacking and smoke signaling days, however, new innovations have continued to allow those connections to be made despite the restrictions of living in a physical world. What this means is that people are increasingly empowered to form active communities with members spanning the entirety of the world.

What happens when people are empowered in such ways? How do they use this empowerment? What does the future hold? Not all of these questions can be easily answered, but by the time you are done reading this, it is the hope that the reader will better understand a Web Application called “Twitter”, and will be able to more easily begin your own search to find your opinion.

A Simple Analogy

For those wondering what Twitter is, think about a cross between texting and Facebook, enabled by the Web. With this understanding, one can gain a functional appreciation of the basic concept. Like texting, Twitter allows users a very limited number of characters (140 characters to be precise) to make their point. This is called a tweet.

Unlike texting, however, twitter delivers the message to a large, active, virtually connected community. Members of that community may choose to “follow” all of another user’s future tweets, retweet (repost) another’s tweets on each other's personal feeds, follow posts to other forms of web content, and a number of other social features that largely grow as the community begins interacting with the system in new ways. Twitter has become the Mobile Phone what channels, commercials, infomercials have been through the use of television. Understandably, many unexpected movements...