The latest local news, weather and high school sports from the Heartland

KIRKSVILLE, MO. -- When it comes to social networking, we've all heard of Myspace and Facebook but, what about Twitter? It's the newest fad and not many people know about it. KTVO hit the streets to find out what its all about.

"So do you know what Twitter is? No, I don't. I've heard of it. What do you think it is? Well its something to do with computers, its like eBay or something like that, Twitter or Facebook," one person said.

"Um, I think it's kind of a website where you can access that through computer or mobile phone where you basically go on there and post your thoughts or what you are doing at the moment." 

"So do you know what Twitter is? I do. Alright, what is it? Twitter is a micro blogging social networking site so its a very short string of words that you can tweet at your friends in very short blurbs. Alright, I couldn't have said it better myself,"

And that's exactly what it is. It's a place where you can connect with people you know, and even the one's you don't.

"Twitter you can opt in, you're only following the things you want to follow that are interesting to you,' said Kevin White, Truman Assistant Athletic Director.

Twitter is best known for allowing you to only use 140 characters. Think of it as a text, but instead of sending it to one contact, every single follower you have whether its five or a thousand, gets the tweet.

So why all the hype surrounding it?

"With social networking you can reach out to people. It's a way for us to communicate and to stay in touch," Don Krause, Truman Assistant Professor said.

Twitter has been around for a while. In fact, since 2006 but just started gaining popularity in the last year or so. And since then there are 175-million registered users.

"About one in eight Americans are on twitter," said Krause.

And if you can imagine this, about 95 million tweets are written per day. Break that down, that's 34 billion-675 million tweets a year.

"140 characters takes you I read somewhere 1.7 seconds to read, so you can stay in touch with a lot of people quickly," Krause said.

When it comes to social networking, people utilize it for different things.

"People can receive alerts on fugitives, maybe even driving tips or weather tips. Just different things that are going on that they might have an interest in that pertains to the police department or the city," said Det. Jeremy Cordray of the Kirksville Police Department.

"We update it extremely often during normal games, we can update it four or five times within a game itself," said White.

So the question is, is Twitter just a fad or will it be around for a while?

"What's next? I'm not really sure. It will probably evolve from some unfulfilled need to communicate so I'm sure there will be something down the road its hard to say exactly what that's going to be," Krause said.

Starting a Twitter account is real easy just click here to get started.