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Last week, @gaurisalokhe invited Jon from (AidWorker Daily) and I as guest speakers in a short FAO info session about micro blogging.

I realized how difficult it is to explain what this social media phenomenon really is all about. Does “Twitter is a micro-blogging tool” associate it too much with “blogging”: “I publish, you read, and if all goes well, you might even comment”?

Maybe this is what Twitter was originally intended for, but how do you explain to anyone it is much more than just ‘publishing 140 character content’. How do you explain the dynamic and the power of a Twitter social community of “followers”?

Another challenge is to explain that apart from ”www.twitter.com”, the web interface for Twitter, there are hundreds of add-ons and tools that make Twitter work for you.

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In the previous post, I elaborated what I use Twitter for, both at work and for my personal sites.

So what is this “Twitter”-thingie then, hey? How can I explain Twitter as a social community tool rather than a blogging tool…? Well try these approaches:

How to explain Twitter? Think of Skype, but different!

You know instant messengers (IM) like Skype or MSN messenger? Then you know how with instant messengers, you can look for friends, add them to your address book and then type messages online.
At its best, you can add several friends into a conversation, type away and have some fun. All your “chats” remain private between those within that conversation.

Twitter is a similar tool, but all text messages are “broadcasted”: they are public messages with a maximum of 140 characters. I don’t have to be in a conversation with one or more people like in Skype. I broadcast. And millions of others are broadcasting just like me, resulting in a mega-stream of thousands public text messages per minute (currently about 10,000 to 15,000 per minute). Any of my “broadcasts” can be searched for, replied to, or rebroadcasted by any other Twitter user.

If people find the stuff I broadcast interesting, they tag me (or become a “follower” in Twitter-lingo). If people “follow me”, they will automatically filter my updates out of the mega stream of a zillion Twitter messages. They will do so for all their followers, effectively creating a message filter for stuff they like and people they are interested in.

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In part 1 of this series, I described what I use Twitter for. In part 2, I highlighted Twitter as a social networking tool.
In this post, we will go slightly more technical: looking at the parts in the engine that make Twitter really useful.

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You have successfully created your Twitter account. You read part 1 of this series and have some pretty good idea what you will use Twitter for. You understand the importance of building social communities, and which tools can help you with those tasks…

And then… the blank Twitter prompt is staring in your face. What to do now?

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