Twitter's overnight internet recognition stems from one plain question: "What are you doing?" You have 140 characters of text to respond, and as soon as you hit Update, the site's millions of users can spot what you're up to. This small initiative has blossomed into an extremely popular trend with its users covering the entire globe. What it does, in a simple and impressive way, is to unite a number of fascinating trends in IM status messages , social software usage, lightweight occurrence indicators, and personal blogging —into a fascinating blend of permanence, public and private. This is the "social-networking and microblogging" site where you can read interesting and everyday quick takes such as "ate an apple" or "just had a great dinner date." But in spite of the service's apparently insignificant function, which causes many to ignore it and can at times make it like listening to other peoples' cell-phone chat, Twitter fills a space left by other forms of communication.

It’s fast and simple to sign up; you must have an email address, username and password. Once in, you can have it check your email contacts to find out if you know any person already using Twitter. Or, it permits you to quickly mail invitations to everyone you’d like. One way or another, you should have some friends prior to getting started. The whole point of Twitter as mentioned above is to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters are less. Your friends immediately see a trace of your answers, and you see a feed of their most recent responses as well.

If none of your real life friends are using Twitter, you can begin making friends by following any person who seems fascinating and informative. Well, it’s not difficult to quickly come across and follow 100 or so pseudo- friends (these may be people whom you already know online but not in person). And each time you add a name to your following list, they get a correspondence from you.

Twitter can also be setup simply for your cellphone. In fact, that’s what it’s intended for (the tweet limit of 140 characters is so that it works well with text messaging). This makes for a bunch of tweets that read something like, “still waiting and so hungry….”

So what’s the real function of Twitter? According to the Twitter FAQ, “Twitter is a service for everyone close to you, family, co-workers and friends to be in touch and stay attached.” Although, some people make use of it more for other reasons or motives. Others use it to find the latest breaking tech stories. News programs are even using it as a marketing strategy. It’s fascinating to see how a few have already claimed it to be a useless habit that should be restrained. However, Twitter is already admired and famous enough to have had a third party like Twitterholic generate a list of the top 100 most popular Twitter users.