Welcome to the second installment in the Slideschool Series: Twitter explained.

This presentation takes you through the basics of why Twitter is such an important communication tool and how you go about making the most of the service.

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In a nutshell, these are the main features of Twitter:

• Stripped down blogging: no titles, categories and only 120 characters of text. Why? So it’s easy to produce and easy to read quickly, using either the web or mobile (SMS).
• A sizeable network who you can follow, or who can choose to follow you. The short, pithy posts make it easy to scan through a thread quickly.
• A robust API that has allowed a number of services to be built on top of Twitter

On the subject of those useful Twitter services, let me list some of the ones I find most useful:

Twitbin: A great add-on for all you Firefox users out there – view updates and post directly from your browser.

Twitterfeed: This is great if you want to further promote your blog on Twitter – your blog posts are excerpted as Twitter posts with links back to the original.

Twitter badges: Place a widget on your homepage, Facebook profile, etc. using this handy application that will list your latest messages.

Twhirl: A popular desktop app for Twitter that lets you get round that pesky browser.

Hashtags tracking: Twitter’s hashtags allow you to pull together content on a similar topic. This handy service allows you to search these topics.

If you find other services particularly useful, feel free to let me know and I’ll update this list.

Go ahead and jump in now! You can follow me at twitter.com/cagedether/.