Dan Grossman

I use Twitter. So do millions of other people — it’s now the third largest social network. But it’s not another Facebook or MySpace, and a lot of people don’t understand just what it is. Here’s an analogy borrowed from a post I made on a forum:

Twitter is like a forum where the default setting for each user is to ignore all other users. When you sign up, you see no posts, an empty forum. You choose who to unignore by “following” other Twitter users.

Want to know what the CEOs of tech companies had to say this week? Follow CEO of Zappos Tony Hsieh, Virgin CEO Richard Branson, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Now your forum fills up with posts only by those people, interleaved chronologically, and available to read at your leisure. Like a forum, you don’t have to be around when they write, you can read everything they’ve written on Twitter in the past.

When you become “friends” with these people on Facebook, you also see anything they’ve written there. But you also see the replies to everything they’ve written, the immature and rude comments left by teens and trolls, left by users you’re not related to at all. Not so on Twitter, you have absolute control over whose messages appear on your page.

What if you also want to cyberstalk a couple celebrities? You’d love to know what Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, Taylor Swift and Britney Spears are up to every day. Follow them and you’ll see all the updates they’ve made.

But you don’t have to mix up all your celebrity news and business advice from the CEOs. Twitter lets you create “lists”, which allow you to group the people you follow. These are like threads of a forum. Put the CEOs in your “CEO” list, and the stars in your “Celebrities” list, and you have two pages — like two threads — to read, instead of just one containing everything said by everyone you follow.

Twitter is not just a way to keep up with famous people, to simply listen. You have your say too, and all the same rules apply for the other millions of users. The messages you post to Twitter, your “tweets”, can be read by anyone that follows you, and you can be added to their lists.