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Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. Anyone can use it to expand their social circle, promote their side business, keep their coursework organized, and more. Whether you want to achieve your Twitter goals, or just use it as a tool to achieve others, these tools will help you get there.

For a service that is remarkably simple, Twitter is often difficult for new users to understand and to quickly turn into something useful. In fact, the simplicity of Twitter can actually be a barrier in the beginning, because there's not much to help a new user get started. So, we've put together this guide, which will help you understand the basic jargon of Twitter, find a good set of Twitter add-ons to streamline and strengthen your Twitter experience, and give you a list of 100 technology experts who are active on Twitter and are worth following.

Twitter is an interesting and practical real-time messaging system for groups and friends. It's just not completely obvious how to get into the "club." So, here's a newbie's guide to this new platform. We don't cover every feature of Twitter, but this should help get you started.

One guys idea of the Why's of using Twitter.

"In a recent conversation, I was asked what I thought about twitter as a learning tool. Over the course of the past few years I've moved from saying "I don't get it" - to feeling like it's a good addition to my Learning Tool Set. But I also think that there's a lot more help now around how to make effective use of Twitter as a learning tool. I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together these resources."

TweetChat helps put your blinders on to the Twitter-sphere while you monitor and chat about one topic. Each tweet you make automatically gets a hashtag added for the room you are in - no need to worry about hashtag typos

"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."

This teacher's kids want to use pop music they love for a project.  Their teacher wants them to do so legally and with respect, so he's trying to contact the artist directly.  To get her attention (the artist is Taylor Swift), he's asking all his Twitter PLN to re-tweet his open letter to Taylor Swift to her Twitter account, so her mentions column will be filled with the RT of his letter.  If you Tweet, please copy and paste this into Twitter:RT @thenerdyteacher An Open Letter to @TaylorSwift13 - http://bit.ly/gV6uaH

Great post about the power of Twitter. It is almost so commonplace as to be trite. But it isn't trite. It is a very real part of a good teacher's PLN. Better than a search engine, the people engine of a giving, helpful group of twitters. But remember that in order to Tweet and receive, you also have to share and receive. You get back far more than you give but you should give not just ask. In short, be there for your tweeps and your tweeps will be there for you.

Twitt(url)y is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Wondering to tweet or not? retweet or not? Tadvise can help you! Tadvise is an advisor and assistant for Twitter. It analyses your followers and also the followers of your followers and reports you if the tweet that you are going to send is interesting (or relevant) for them or not. It also recommends you several followers, who can efficiently retweet your tweet... plus more features... Tadvise aims to boost collaboration by encouraging users to (re)tweet worthy items and thus helping you to get only appropriate stuff.

some tips to get started with Twitter

* Get found by tweeps near you * Find tweeps near you based on location or keyword * Post and browse local events and specials

Busy teachers may feel that taking the time to learn how to use Twitter isn't worth the return for the students benefit, so that's why this list of 100 tips, apps, and resources is worth browsing.