Although Twitter has added its name to the growing list of social networking sites, it has yet to become the No. 1 hit.

Twitter, was created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone and launched in March of 2006. According to its website, users tell their friends “what’s new” in 140 characters or less. This differs from the other social networking sites like Facebook, which allows for a more lengthy interaction between friends.

Twitter’s website attributes its success to the simplicity of the site. It enables people to connect with one another by asking one question, “What’s happening?” The “tweet” is the user’s response to that question. The tweet then is sent to whoever is following the user.

Cristina Shary, senior journalism major, said despite Twitter’s claims to be simple, it is a little complicated.

“I’ve had it for awhile and am still trying to get the hang of it,” Shary said.

According to Quantcast, a company based in San Francisco and New York that measures the amount of users on websites and provides audience profiles, Twitter has more than 23 million users. In comparison, Facebook has 116 million users.

According to its website, Twitter’s followers receive the messages via either their phone, instant message or from the website itself. Twitter markets itself as being a social networking site where people can be as involved as they want to be.

In other words, the user gets out of it, what they put in. With the “tweets” coming to users phones, they have the option of reading them or not.

As Twitter’s website puts it, the tweets are “for the most part rhetorical.” It allows the users to be selective about the information they receive and how much they receive.

Facebook on the other hand is more in-depth. According to its website, Facebook users can post their current activities in their status and perform other functions as well.

Users can plan events, play games, write emails, write notes and post photographs all within their social network.

Although not on the top of the list, Twitter has still grown 414 percent over the last year.

Twitter’s number of users jumped from a little over 5 million to its current number of almost 23 million users, according to Compete, an online behavior analysis website.

This is significant growth for Twitter when compared to Facebook’s 121 percent growth over the last year.

According to Twitter’s website, its selling point is that people can get short bits of information quickly, which makes the service useful.

According to the site, when Dorsey created the Twitter, he did it to of finding out what his friends were up to. When he presented the idea to his colleagues they came up with the website.

The site was funded by Obvious, a corporation that builds websites, which is located in San Francisco.

Shary said Twitter seems like a service that can get a lot of information out to a large number of people all at once.

She said she uses Twitter once every few days since she doesn’t want to inundate people with information.

“If you tweet too many times a day, then people will stop following you,” Shary said.

She said that some people do use Twitter to tweet about regular everyday things as well, like “I just got up.” These are the kind of people who abuse Twitter, Shary said.

“If people tweet all the time it can clog up your phone,” Shary said.

She said one of its features is that if you want to talk about a certain subject you can type it in and see what other people are saying about the subject and join in.

For example, Shary said that if you wanted to talk about the latest Desperate Housewives episode, you can type it in and see what other people are saying on the subject. Then you can add in your own thoughts as well.

Also, Twitter has a search bar that has a list of the most popular searched topics. Users can click on the topics and provide additional thoughts on the content.

Stephen Gillis, senior journalism major, said he does not use Twitter because he does not see what benefits it could offer him.

“If something significant happens in my life, it won’t fit into 140 characters,” Gillis said.

Shary said not many of her friends use Twitter and she does not know very many people at Sacramento State that use it either.

Shary said mostly older people use Twitter, like public officials and celebs.

Twitter has other benefits besides keeping in touch with friends.

“Public officials use it so when things happen they can put it up instantly,” Shary said.

Shary said in addition, many politicians, celebrities and other organizations are on Twitter for similar reasons.

She said the tweets come up instantaneously, people get the news quickly and are immediately connected and “in the loop.”

It kind of empowers people in a way because they are just as connected to events as those involved in the events.

Joshua Amador, senior business major, said he admires Twitter’s timeliness.

“When the shooting happened in the dorms on campus last semester, I knew where to go and where not to go because of my friends’ tweets,” Amador said.

He said he is glad that many organizations in the area have picked up a Twitter account.

Amador said it has made it being “connected” a lot easier for him.

He said because of his busy schedule he has a hard time following current events but Twitter helps to break that.

Amador said he agrees that some aspects of Twitter are petty and irrelevant but for the most part he finds Twitter advantageous to communities everywhere.

“Sure, there are some stupid celebs gossiping about their latest scandal,” Amador said.

“But then there are also people trying to raise funds for Haiti survivors and succeeding &- I think the good outweighs the bad there.”

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