Twitter: the very basics

You know how some things are so simple, everyone is confused by them? Twitter is one of those things.
People who sign up for Twitter get a blog, blogs on Twitter have some rules. Here are the rules of the blog:

1. You can decide if you'll let the public read your Twitter blog, or only your friends.
2. You can block specific users (aka jerks) from reading your blog.
3. Your homepage will show you all posts from your blog and all your friends.
4. Every blog post is less than 140 characters. So we call them “microblogs.”
5. You can use shorthand to link to other users using the @ sign, like this “I'm mad @MatthewPetty for not updating his blogs.”
6. You can search use unique keywords and the search tool to keep track of conversations. For instance, use #faypol to include your comment in a public discussion of politics in my hometown (Fayetteville, Arkansas).

That's it, those are the rules. Twitter is just a place where people can have short blogs that include links to other webpages, Twitter users, or conversations.

 
Twitter vocabulary
Each post to a Twitter blog is called a tweet.
If you repost someone else's tweet and give them credit, it's called a retweet or RT.
When you choose to get live updates on someone else's Twitter blog, it's called following them. When someone follows you, they become one of your followers.