"Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called 'Explore' for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks. The service was started by Obvious Corp, who also started Odeo. In April 2008 Twitter launched Twitter Japan in partnership with Digital Garage."

"Twitter allows users to post text updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website and third party applications. Users have their own profile page that displays their latest updates. In addition, users can become 'friends' with one another, or simply be a 'follower.' Other than reading another person’s profile page, a user can also receive others’ updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications. Twitter itself is a free service, though users may have to pay text messaging charges to the phone carriers."

CrunchBase - Twitter Company Profile

"Twitter's overnight Internet fame stems from one simple question: 'What are you doing?' You have 140 characters of text to answer, and as soon as you hit Update, the site's millions of users can see what you're up to. This small idea has blossomed into a hugely popular phenomenon, with its users covering the entire Earth, developers creating scores of helper apps for it, and a raft of imitation sites. This is the 'social-networking and microblogging' site where you can read fascinating and mundane quick takes such as 'ate a piece of cherry pie' or 'just had a great workout.' But despite the service's seemingly trivial function, which causes many to snub it and can at times make it akin to listening to other peoples' cell-phone conversations, Twitter fills a gap left by other forms of communication."

Get the Word Out - Fast! - Twitter - At A Glance - Reviews by PC Magazine

I’ve spoken and posted in the past about how geeks can help in emergencies. Today I flew up to San Francisco and spoke at a Net Squared event for non-profits about how they could best put Twitter to use.

My experiences in the San Diego fires of 2007 gave me an interesting outlook on how Twitter, as a tool, could be applied in different circumstances. Just a few months after (and some even during) the 2007 firestorm some agencies are scratching the surface of what’s possible with this service.

At the outset of my talk I made sure to be clear that Twitter is a tool. It’s a good one for some cases and organizations and useless for others. Don’t make Twitter the hammer and start looking at everything like a nail. Twitter does some things very well, but it doesn’t fit every organization’s goals.

Britt (who is awesome by the way) asked me a question in our pre-talk interview. “How could Twitter be used for non-profits?”. A question like that is too broad to answer. It’s like asking how a website could be used for a business. Instead, I came up with a set of advantages Twitter has which may be used to help determine if Twitter could be useful for your organization. If one of these criterion benefits your community without too many hurdles for adoption, then Twitter might be the right tool for you.
Twitter benefits

1. Speed Using twitter, you can very easily publish information more than once per minute. If distribution speed is critical, regardless of the information being distributed, Twitter may be the tool for you.

2. Non-website (source) based alerts Instant messaging, SMS/text messages on cell phones, RSS/Atom feeds, email alerts, badges/widgets on other sites, and other methods of distribution are available. If your community can’t be tethered to a website for it’s communications, Twitter can provide other methodologies to get that information out to them.

3. Community publishing There are a few (slightly more technical) ways of aggregating a group of twitterers posts, which means you could have more people — even your community — pitching in to help publish pertinent information.

The limitations of Twitter

Yes, there are some limitations to Twitter — seemingly huge obstacles to its usefulness.

1. Only text and links can be posted. No maps. No photos. No videos. Text and links are all you get.

2. 140 character limit. URLs will get shortened wherever possible, but 140 characters is tough to get used to.

3. No conversation threading. This can be tough to deal with when you’re used to discussion forums and such. Connecting with your community in this way is almost limited to real-time dialogue, which can limit the conversation’s depth and longevity.

4. The API has a 70 post per hour limit. Note that from what I could tell, the web UI doesn’t have this limit, but I’m sure they wouldn’t like you posting more than that unless it was an emergency anyway.

There are other limitations as well which I’m not necessarily documenting here. But, the ones listed here can seem insurmountable. Trust me, they’re not. They merely make you work around them. But that work around is only about 15 minutes of work and then you’re set.

Source: http://blog.perfectspace.com/2008/01/09/using-twitter-to-help-communitie...