Twitter is a popular microblogging online tool launched in 2006 that has gone on to become extremely popular.

The idea behind Twitter is quite simple: sign up for the service and publish short messages (maximum 140 characters) in your profile. Plus, creating a Twitter profile is very easy: you only need to pick a username and provide an email address.

Once on Twitter it’s time to start following some people! The best thing about Twitter is not just the messages you write, but also those written by other people. When you find someone interesting, you can start following them and their tweets will appear on your timeline.

Besides standard messages, you can also use Twitter to send replies to specific users (by inserting their usernames at the beginning of the tweet), re-tweet (forward) messages you consider relevant or especially worth sharing and exchange direct (private) messages with just another user. Twitter also lets you mark messages as Favorites and create lists of users according to any topic.

The Twitter interface is simple and highly functional. You can easily customize it with colors and backgrounds. The top “What’s happening?” text field is what you use to publish your tweets. Right below it, you’ll see the timeline. And the column on the right holds some stats: following and followers, number of published tweets, a small search field and the top trending topics currently on Twitter.

There are many other online services that complement Twitter, such as photo hosting services to share images, and URL shorteners to make the most of the 140-character limit. On the downside, and probably due to its increasing popularity, Twitter has a tendency to go down – especially in the case of an important world event or during the celebration of a techie event.

Twitter is an easy microblogging app that has created a whole revolution in the way we communicate and share stuff with each other.