The Internet rage these days, and the fastest growing social (and political) networking site, Twitter, has become a powerful communications tool for just about everyone with a purpose, or absolutely no purpose at all. From the high and the mighty who tweet to communicate with their legions of supporters, to teenagers who just want to tell their friends what the dried coffee in the bottom of their cup looks like, twittering is sweeping the country. You can use Twitter to start a revolution or as a mindless way to pass idle time.

You may not give a hoot about tweeting, I didn't until recently, but let me assure you it’s changing the way people communicate. After candidate Barack Obama’s successful use of Twitter, there will never be another winning presidential campaign that doesn’t use it or a service like it. But Twitter is a two-edged sword. People across the country, many you would never find on any other blog, are using it to express their opinions like never before; and they’re reaching more people, including the political and media elite, who are listening attentively to what they have to say.

Twitter, only three years old, is a simple and free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read140-space text-based tweets that are displayed on the user's profile page and sent to “followers” computers or mobile devices. The ability to reduce long URLs to as short as 19 spaces, and the use of “hashtags” that allow users to include links to web pages and lists of updates by keyword makes Twitter a versatile and powerful tool. Different people use it for different purposes. Depending on their following, they can quickly communicate with tens of thousands of people or just a few.

Famous people--politicians, entertainers, people in the media--use Twitter to update their followers on what they’re doing on a regular basis and keep people interested in them and their activities. Barack Obama (@BarackObama), who currently has 612,500 followers, used Twitter very effectively during the campaign. Senator John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain), currently 300,000 followers, personally uses it extensively now. His presidential campaign (@JohnMcCain), made only modest use of it.

Tens of thousands of people who aren’t famous use Twitter to drive traffic to their blog or websites; I’m guilty of that (@EWRoss). I have 400 followers after a month on Twitter. There are Twitter users with thousands of followers whose websites tell other people how to use Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace or that offer advice on life, beauty tips, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Then there are all those who use Twitter like they were talking to themselves in the mirror except their mirror is their computer or mobile device. They post inane mutterances that make sense only to themselves and perhaps a few people who know them extremely well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If it makes them feel better, it’s cheap therapy; and communicating with a small circle of friends is one of the purposes Twitter is intended for. You can block your updates so that only the people you want to read them can.

Because of all the seemingly senseless blurbs on Twitter, it’s increasingly been the subject of an unending stream of jokes, but don’t let the humor fool you. Politicians and people in the news media broke the code on Twitter during the presidential campaign. You can hardly watch a cable news program these days without hearing references to it or someone asking you to twitter your comments about the program. People have written hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about Twitter, and people in the know recognize its potential. Yahoo offered the owners of Twitter $300 million for the site which has no revenue stream. It’s free to join and it posts no advertisement.

Twitter not only is a vehicle for the popular or powerful to communicate with their supporters, it’s increasingly a tool for people to share their comments with large numbers of other people who think as they do and have their voices heard.

More and more everyday people are discovering how Twitter, skillfully used with witty one-liners and links, gives them an audience and a voice they would not otherwise have on conventional blogs. Because Twitter gives any user the ability to browse the profiles of all Twitter users and follow as many as they choose, they attract people to follow them in return. And because an increasing number of new websites aggregate the updates of various groups on Twitter, an individual’s updates are read by hundreds, if not thousands, of people who might not otherwise have read them, attracting even more followers.

A good example is Top Conservatives On Twitter. Any Twitter user can list themselves as a conservative on the site, and just by adding the hashtag #tcot to their updates they appear on a continuously updated feed on the #TCOT REPORT, a site which bears a striking resemblance to the DRUDGE REPORT. While the former has nowhere near the visitors of the latter, its following is growing quickly. A liberal/progressive counter part on Twitter is Topprog.org.

In recent weeks, Twitter has been humming with tweets by people who are outraged at the way government is spending billions on bailouts and how companies like AIG are wasting it on luxury retreats and bonuses. The hundreds of tea parties organized around the country to protest government spending made effective use of grass-roots efforts on Twitter to tell people about them and rally them to attend them. President Obama, of course, has become a favorite target of conservative tweets.

It’s no longer the hard-core bloggers who are making their voices heard; it’s anyone with a computer or a cell phone and something intelligent to say. Thousands of new users join Twitter everyday; a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed by the political parties, the news media, and the internet world. No one can predict precisely where all this is headed, but no one should underestimate the power of tweeting. You may not tweet, but people all around you do; and if you’re not tweeting, you’ll be the last to know who’s organizing the revolution.