Why Everyone's Talking about Twitter

If you ever fancied yourself a blogger but didn't have the time or energy to post thoughtful or silly missives at regular intervals, a new service called Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.

Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't have much to say. Or maybe you're just lazy. Not a problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group text message to your friends' mobile phones from either your own phone, an instant message or an online form at twitter.com. All your notes are then stored and displayed on your personal profile page on the site, which includes links to your friends' Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choice, and a short bio. You can even send text updates directly to your MySpace page. Just remember to keep it short: posts are limited to 140 characters, and the topic is, invariably, "what are you doing?''

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

Twitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic  analysis. Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382%, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio with 240% increase, and Facebook with 228% increase. However, Twitter has a user retention rate of 40%