During the summer we were fortunate to have had the assistance of a summer student, Christian Wright.Although he possessed a quiet, soft-spoken demeanour after spending some time with him I quickly realised he was filled with great insight on a variety of topics.This being said, I thought that it would be interesting to publish some of his work at the start of the school year, including his following insight on Twitter.Throughout the past decade there have been a number of social networks created and introduced to society, each being the “talk of the town” at one point, usually in the infant days of its cyber-life. Unfortunately, people are very fickle when it comes to social media. We love to try out everything and usually want what’s new, fresh and hot. This leads to a social network’s short lifespan.But on to what’s hot and fresh now among teens: Twitter.Twitter is not new to the realm of social media. It was launched in July, 2006.The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million active users as of 2012. However, it only started to become popular in Bermuda, in the past three or four years.For those of you who are very private when it comes to social networking, Twitter has a feature which enables you to protect your tweets and information, making them invisible to strangers. With this feature you can also control who is able to follow you. If someone wants to follow you, they can click the follow button on your profile.But instead of instantly saying “Followed” it would say “Pending” and a request will be sent to you — it’s up to you whether you accept or decline.What if you don’t want to protect your profile, but still want the option of privately and directly communicating with one of your followers?Twitter has a feature for that as well. This direct commutation is possible using “Direct Messaging” (DM). This facet permits users to send a text of 140 characters directly to a follower.Some may ridicule Twitter users because many find their tweets to be redundant and meaningless and I will admit most are. Many also complain that many users tweet too much. Again I agree. To help combat the “Over Tweeting” Twitter has implemented a regulation on your tweets per day. If one were to exceed the limit, they would be placed in “Twitter Jail” (temporary account suspension). If they continue to violate twitters terms and agreements they may face permanent suspension.All in all, I think twitter is a brilliant tool, when used correctly. If you do not yet have a twitter account, I encourage you to create an account and try it for yourself.-Christian Wright, 2012We’d love to know what topics you’d be interested in learning more about, so e-mail us at TechBuzz@btc.bm