Need a reason to sign up for Twitter (www.twitter.com)? Learn what is twitter and why you need it.

Twitter is a real-time microblogging service that allows friends and family to keep in contact with each other throughout the day. This service allows you to write short messages less than 140 characters, known as tweets. It also allows you to follow other people on Twitter, and receive their tweet stream. These tweets can be received on a variety of clients on a variety of devices. Twitter clients exist for many desktop and mobile devices. For example, the TweetDeck client is available for the PC, Mac, iPhone and Andriod phone, while the UberTwitter client is available on the iPhone and the Blackberry.

Why would you want to sign up a Twitter account?

The most common question that family members ask each other at the end of the day is: how was your day? With Twitter, you no longer have to ask that question. If your family and friends acquire the habit of tweeting throughout the day, you can find out what they are doing in real time by following their tweets. This way, even though you are physically separated, you are still connected to your loved ones. Many people love Twitter because with a Twitter client running in the background, they feel surrounded by the virtual presence of their family. Of course, you can follow other people besides family and friends. Many movie stars and celebrities have Twitter feeds, and are followed by thousands of their fans on Twitter. For example, you can follow Kim Kardashian on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kimkardashian, the Kim Kardashian Twitter page.

The 140 characters limit imposed by Twitter was originally designed to fit onto a standard text message for mobile messaging. Another 20 characters is reserved for user names, so the total message prefixed by the user name is 160 characters. The idea was to allow people to send the same phone text messages that they are already used to, but now on the Internet. Along the way, the founders of Twitter found that once these text messages are transplanted onto the Internet, you can do a bunch of cool stuff with the messages that were not possible with standard SMS text messages. An early innovation was the invention of the hashtag. A hashtag is simply a word of phrase that is preceded by the # character. If your tweet contains a hashtag, they can be grouped and searched based on the tag, something which is not possible with SMS messages.

So, if you want to sign up for a Twitter account and connect with your family, go on over to www.twitter.com and use the Twitter sign up page.