Ever thought about using Twitter to get some eBay business? Twitter has 500 million total users (more than 215 million active users) and serves up over 500 million tweets a day. What’s a tweet? Not just a sound effect from a parakeet anymore. Now it’s a short online comment from one Twitter user to another; tweets often flit back and forth between users who follow each other.

Direct messages (DMs) let you send your contacts private notes through Twitter. Just like regular tweets and @replies, direct messages are limited to 140 characters. Unlike regular tweets and @replies, the only person who can see a direct message is the recipient. You can send a DM only to a Twitter user who's following you (but you don't have to be following that user), which helps cut down on spamming and other unwanted messages.

Using Twitter is fun and surprisingly easy. It doesn’t matter where you access Twitter, — on Twitter.com, or on a desktop or mobile app on your smartphone. You can quickly navigate the Twitterverse with just a few commands. Even Twitter etiquette is straightforward and simple. Before you know it, you’ll be sending Tweets and following on Twitter like an expert.

Many twitterers use Twitter almost exclusively on their mobile phones. Text messaging (SMS) is the most basic way to access Twitter via your cellphone. In addition to sending tweets as SMS messages from your phone, you can receive your contacts’ tweets on your phone via SMS.Open your own Home screen and, under Device Updates on the right sidebar, click phone to activate your phone notifications.

With many web services, signing up is the easiest part of an otherwise-complicated process. With Twitter, using the site is just as easy as signing up. To sign up for a Twitter account, follow these steps:Use your web browser to navigate to the Twitter website.Twitter website.">The Twitter splash screen appears.

In the early days of Twitter, it was commonplace for people not to just reply to Tweets they liked, but to forward that Tweet on to their own followers by simply copying the text in the original Tweet and pasting it in a new Tweet. This practice grew to be known as retweeting (RT for short) and was so popular that Twitter built that functionality directly into their interface.

Because of the 140-character limit for tweets, people often abbreviate common words and phrases on Twitter. The following table has abbreviations, or Twitter shorthand, that you see often. You will most likely want to use the shorthand, so the table illustrates its use in Twitter messaging. Twitter Shorthand Abbreviation What It Means Usage 4 For What do you want it 4?

You can find your friends on Twitter by importing contacts lists from other services — such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, and Hotmail — that you already use. Twitter will let you know who among your contacts are already busily tweeting away as registered Twitterers. Click Who to Follow at the top and then click the Find Friends tab.

Your avatar appears to the left of all your tweets, so it's your official face on Twitter. People don't like following you on Twitter if your avatar is just the default. So make sure that you change your Twitter avatar to a photo of yourself or a picture of something else. You can also change your Twitter avatar as often as you like.