Twitter is a microblogging service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates (“tweets”) of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter Search.

Twitter is currently the most popular microblogging network, with almost 23 million unique visitors to its home page in June 2009 (Source: Compete.com).  Not included are the many people that access their Twitter data via numerous 3rd party applications.