Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. In 2006 Williams and Biz Stone co-founded Obvious Corp along with other former Odeo employees. Twitter was created as a separate company in April 2007 by Obvious Corp. Jack Dorsey was chief executive officer of Twitter until October 2008 when Williams became CEO and Dorsey shifted to the position of chairman of the board.

Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has become very popular worldwide. Twitter is the fastest growing free micro-blogging software that allows you to keep in touch with people through quick, frequent answers to one question: What are you doing? That one little question has launched a media revolution.

“Tweet” is the term for the 140 maximum character messages posted on Twitter. For tweeting to be effective, it must be done systematically, with posts being made daily. For the average business owner or marketing executive, this can be very impractical because of the time required. Fortunately, technology provides ways to get things done quicker.

One such technology is a tool called BigTweet. BigTweet is a plugin for your Web browser that lets you post a tweet to Twitter by just clicking the BigTweet button, located on your browser’s link menu. Highlighting a passage on a web page and clicking the button creates a tweet from the text you highlighted, in addition to the title of the page and a short URL. If you do not highlight any words on the page, then the text of the tweet will just contain the page title and short URL.

Another more powerful technique is to use Tweet Later. Tweet Later is a Twitter management application that lets you accomplish a few critical Twitter tasks automatically. For one, it lets you pre-program “spinnable” tweets in advance. By spinnable, I mean that the tweets can contain alternate words or passages that that software chooses from at random. It’s a dynamic technology that allows one tweet to become the basis for numerous unique tweets. Tweet Later will also automatically follow back anyone who follows you and send a personal message to all new followers.

Business people are just now beginning to realize the power of Twitter as an online promotional tool. It seems strange and awkward at first, and it takes some time to get good at it. So don’t spin your wheels trying to figure it out. Use tools like BigTweet and Tweet Later to get more done in less time.