All you ever wanted to know about Twitter... but were afraid to ask

1 What is Twitter?

Twitter is a way to send a short message — in 140 characters or fewer — to a lot of people (as of March this year 200 million people subscribed to the social networking site). Of course, none of us has the time to read the missives of 200 million people, so once you’ve subscribed to the service (which is free), you can choose exactly who you want to “follow”, whether it’s your friends and colleagues, or Libyan rebels, or your favourite Premier League player. What you can’t choose, however, is who follows you. Encouraging people to take an interest in what you have to say is all part of the fun.

Why bother doing it? You may think it’s all pointless babble (research shows that 40 per cent of it is) but it’s also a place where world news is broken — and where you can find out what Stephen Fry had for breakfast.

And if you’re wondering why the messages are limited to 140 keystrokes, it’s because the boffins who created Twitter did so after setting themselves the challenge of providing a free internet service that emulated the short messaging system (SMS) used by mobile phones.

2 How do I get started?

After signing up on twitter.com and choosing a user name, your first task should be to make friends.

Do you want to read Alain de Botton’s condensed philosophising (May 9: the desire to be known to and liked by complete strangers should be treated as an illness like any other)? If so, find him through Twitter’s search box, and click to follow his feed (he’s @alaindebotton). Or perhaps you prefer a running commentary on Lady Gaga’s life (“May 23: My water just broke”)? Join her ten million followers. Once you have started following people — whether writers or actors, politicians or pop stars, or just your local library and your best friends — all of their “tweets” appear in chronological order on your screen as they are published.

Suddenly, you have a live feed of their thoughts and actions as they unfold. If that sounds boring (Lady Gaga, May 23: “I love spaghetti with fresh pomodoro my family and I make fresh in our friends backyard”), you can simply stop following them. Or if it’s fascinating, you can post a reply: “Hey, Lady G, spag pom tastes better if you grate dark chocolate over it instead of Parmesan.”

3 But how do I get people to follow me?

Ah yes, listening is so 20th century. The internet is about you — and you want the world to hear what you have to say.

The bad news is that there are no short cuts. It is possible to amass thousands of followers overnight, such as when IT consultant Sohaib Athar tweeted, under his Twitter name @ReallyVirtual, “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)”, accidentally breaking the news of the US assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Otherwise it can be a slow process. Someone you follow may get curious and decide to follow you, perhaps because you’ve posted an interesting reply to something they’ve written. Others may even follow you because they mistake you for someone else (who’d have thought you shared a name with an American football star?). If not, you need to tweet into the ether and hope someone happens across your missives, likes what you have to say and then passes it to their friends, or “retweets” it. So make your 140 characters count — Stephen Fry can get away with talking about being stuck in a lift, you can’t. The more interesting you are, the more people will go to your page and “follow” your updates and the larger your audience will become.

4 I don’t really have much interest in making friends, and I don’t have anything interesting to say

Congratulations! You are perfect Twitter material ... were it not for the fact that, unlike much of Twitter, you seem to be self-aware. Nevertheless, being boring and asocial is no impediment to enjoying the site. Whereas in Facebook and other social networks you form virtual “friendships” and share photographs, hobbies and all sorts of personal information, the relationships on Twitter do not have to be two-way and there is no obligation to interact with anyone else. In fact, there is no obligation to write anything whatsoever.

While some people add new tweets and updates several times a day, others write nothing at all and simply sign up to Twitter to find interesting people and read their thoughts on the biggest topics of the day or the latest developments in their particular field. Such as, say, when Jedward performed for the most powerful man in the world: “Its so cool a year ago we met President @BarackObama as a wax work but this time he was Real and he moved and he was a Jedward fan!”

5 Why should I tweet?

Perhaps your government is restricting your right to free assembly? Maybe you want to speak out against human rights abuses, and bring down a corrupt dictatorship? Or maybe you just had a bad meal at a particular restaurant and you want the world to know about it? Fire off a tweet and you might get an apology (for the bad food, that is, not the vicious tyrant).

Of course, Twitter isn’t only for noble causes, big and small. Perhaps you want to poke fun at the Question Time panel? Type in your thoughts to join a national conversation, live, as the show develops. And if you add the hashtag #BBCQT at the end of your tweet, anyone else searching for the topic will receive your views (another good way to acquire new followers).

Put simply, Twitter is like running your own news website. You update your page only with the nuggets of information and observation that you find interesting enough to share and you follow only the people who have something interesting to say, tailored however you choose.

6 What was that about hashtags?

At its worst, Twitter is like a vast, somewhat insidious, school playground. The cool kids (Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran and — really — Sarah Brown) talk to each other, everyone else listens — and we all try to be their friend. Occasionally someone a lot less cool makes the mistake of talking to them, only to be completely blanked. For a medium credited with toppling tyrannical regimes, Twitter can sometimes itself feel surprisingly like one.

But the humble “#” is the site’s nod to democracy. If there is a running topic people are discussing, it will have a hashtag. It could be #royalwedding, for the royal wedding, or #OBL for the death of Osama bin Laden. Adding a hashtag — putting a “#” symbol in front of the theme in question — helps to sort tweets by subject and creates a special link: clicking a hashtag in someone’s update lets you see all the tweets in the world that are being written about that particular subject. And then your tweet can sink or swim on its own merits along with those of the cool kids.

7 What equipment do I need?

Technically, you need only a text message facility on your phone to be able to tweet. But that’s like saying that, technically, you need only an abacus to be able to run the Large Hadron Collider. Twitter began on computers, and computers are its milieu — for the full experience you need a computer, and you need the internet. Twitter recognises, however, that this presents a difficulty for those who wish to tweet at the dinner table/ christenings/their divorce proceedings so, along with the text message facility, there are several smart phone apps competing to give users a fully mobile version. If you want to explore the technological options further, go to http://tinyurl.com/ycm9pv6

8 Will I get into trouble with the law?

The correct answer is, only if you break it. As any judge will tell you, the laws in cyberspace are the same as in real space. However, those judges also told us we couldn’t say “Ryan Giggs had an affair”. And yet here we are, thanks partly to Twitter, saying, “Ryan Giggs had an affair”. In practice, Twitter takes an I-am-Spartacus approach to rule breaking. Currently, 75,000 people are under threat of prosecution, after telling the world about injunctions such as Giggs’s. Which is exactly the same as saying, nobody is under threat of prosecution.

It doesn’t always work, though. When tweeter Paul Chambers joked with a friend on Twitter that he would blow Robin Hood airport in Doncaster “sky high” if they delayed his flight due to snow, he was convicted of sending a menacing electronic communication. Despite his original tweet being rebroadcast around the world by supporters, he was still fined £385.

9 Still don’t get it? Here’s our guide:

Signing up
Simply go to Twitter.com, fill out the basic information on the homepage and click “Sign Up”. You do not have to share any personal information and need only a valid e-mail address to get started.

Choose a username
It might just be your name, a nickname, your company name or something anonymous. Your username will then appear with an “@” symbol before it, such as: @TheTimes2

Personalise your profile
You can, if you wish, add a small picture of yourself or your company logo and write a very short, 160-character summary of who you are. Ask yourself why people should follow you.

Find interesting people to follow
You can look for individual users in the “Search” box. When you find someone interesting, take a look at who they are following and see who catches your eye. For a list of The Times’s journalists on Twitter, for example, visit bit.ly/TimesTweeters, or for The Times’s recommendations of the best tweeters in the arts world, visit thetim.es/ArtsTweeters Start tweeting You have 140 characters to say anything you like (within the law, of course). As you type, your word count will tick down to zero, showing how much space you have left. When you are done, hit “Return” and it will be published on your page for your followers to see. You can always delete a tweet later if you change your mind.

10 Who do I follow?

Here are some fun ones to get you started:

@Betfairpoker nothing to do with poker. Just a work of comedy storytelling genius: “The key to a successful date is bringing along another date. It creates a competitive atmosphere and doubles your chance of success.”

@Queen_UK amusing thoughts from someone posing as the Queen: “Text from Mr Obama: ‘What time is dinner? Do I have to spend all afternoon with this Cameron guy?!’ One can relate.”

@KanyeWest the tough life of a mega hip-hop star: “I specifically ordered Persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple Persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh.”

@Aiannucci comedy writer Armando Iannucci: “All over the White House they’re sending e-mails saying ‘this is a good day to bury bin Laden’.”

@SimonBlackwell writer for The Thick of It and Have I Got News For You: “I am a renaissance man, but only in the sense that I wear mauve pantaloons and have tertiary syphilis.”

@SimonPegg star of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead: “I just took my daughter to baby ballet and there was a little girl there that looked very similar to her. It was like Black Cygnet.”

@SallyBercow the indiscreet wife of the Commons Speaker: “Fusty relative muttering about ‘church clothes’. Surely God doesn’t have a problem with skinny jeans & hi-tops?”

@warne888 Shane Warne, cricketer and alleged lover of Elizabeth Hurley: “To @ElizabethHurley — Thankyou for your kind donation of a pair of white jeans — they are very sexy . . . What size are they E? Xxxxx.”

@WayneRooney Manchester Utd footballer: “Haha, bit of banter and people go nuts. Chill all people.”

@prodnose aka Danny Baker: “That was odd. Neighbour just knocked looking perturbed. Had I just heard a series of gunshots? I said I hadn’t. ‘Oh good,’ he said and went.”