Just what is social networking? Well, it is a lot like it sounds. It is networking with individuals, with similar interests, and different social groups. Take a collection of people who are all interested in butterflies and you have a social group that a butterfly lover may want to converse with, share interests, ideas, and exchange butterfly stories with. When you associate yourself with a group of like-minded people, you are social networking. Since people are social human beings, it is a natural inclination for us to gravitate toward others who share our beliefs and interests, etc. There are obviously all kinds of these groups in the physical world but this is extremely popular online. The reasons are because of the world-wide reach of the internet. Where once, you may have only known a few people interested in the same things you are, now you can find millions.

One such "social networking" website is called Twitter. Twitter is a type of social site where you can keep your "followers", who may be friends and family, up-to-date on what you are doing. It is like a personal weblog, or blog, but more in the form of a simple message. Such as what you would type up in a quick text on your cell phone. You can only type in up to 140 characters in a single posting. These postings are called "tweets". Your followers can also be strangers whom youve allowed to see your tweets and may have become a follower simply because they happen to like what you have been tweeting about. In the online world, these tweets, and followers of your tweets, can add up to some pretty substantial social networking going on.

There are many of these websites but this particular site started out without much fanfare but has literally become an online social revolution. It has become so popular that people use it for many different purposes, such as business and advertising, bulletin-board type updates, and so forth. It is much like Facebook, or Myspace, in that you can build up a list of followers and people that you are following and share information back and forth in the form of 140-character tweets. You now hear about big businesses in the offline world starting to use Twitter and the government is even getting in on this social revolutionizing site.

The site is free to join. At first, I personally thought this was a weird concept. I didnt see the use in a bunch of people posting little messages on a site that no one would read. But it turns out that if you build your social "network", they will all read your message. This can obviously be a very powerful thing, if used correctly. Additionally, the major search engines seem to love this site because it provides fresh content on a real time, immediate basis. Information is what the internet is all about and with this kind of info-juice constantly being updated, its no wonder that search engines, like Google, love it too. This can in turn, lead to more people seeing whatever it is you are "tweeting", or saying. No wonder big business and government are coming onboard.