How does twitter work?

How does twitter work? What am I suppose to do on it?

• Okay I've got this twitter account for more than 2 years now and I am following 10 people in total. A lot of my younger friends seem to use it. I'm more a facebook & ICQ / MSN era person. What am I actually suppose to do with twitter?? That account's been sitting there for 2 years and I log in twice a year to see what's going on. Nuttin. Nuttin-at-all man. Am I suppose to type something every 2 minutes into some box or something? What's twitter? How do I use it? What am I suppose to do with it? If I type something into some box, is everyone I'm following going to see it? or everyone who's following me sees it? What if I just want to send one person I'm following a brief message? Does Twitter do that sort of service? Or does everything I type to that single person, gets seen by everybody following me? So far twitter comes across as really boring to me, maybe because I am not using it right. Please enlighten me. Thanks.

• Answer:

  The point of twitter is to basically say what you're doing, in under 140 characters. Most people tweet quite a lot, and twitter can become very addictive. When you tweet, everyone who follows you can see it, and anyone who doesn't follow you, looking at your page, can see it. However if you protect your tweets, than only your followers can see your profile. You can tweet other people by mentioning them. For instance, if you wanted to talk to someone with the username mrsbieberxx, you would say: @mrsbieberxx hi. You can also dm people, which is when you send people a private message. Twitter is funner if you follow a lot of people. Hope this helps! :)