Twitter is a social networking website that’s designed for finding and sharing short updates. In fact, each post—or tweet as they’re called on Twitter—is limited to just 280 individual characters (letters, spaces, and punctuation marks). That’s not even long enough to include the first two sentences of this paragraph!

Tweets are so short that you might wonder why people bother posting them in the first place. But that’s actually a big part of what makes Twitter so popular: It’s easy to quickly share what’s happening in your world or follow along with a popular topic in real-timev.