Fans of Jonathan Ross or Stephen Fry will have heard them refer to “twittering”. Twitter is a social networking site, like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, but simpler to operate and faster. Twitterers post 140-character micro-blogs, answering the question “What are you doing?”. Participants can “tweet” via email, text or instant messaging, and tweets can include links to websites. They are only received by signed-up “followers”.

There has been a huge growth in knowledge-sharing communities using Twitter to disseminate information in short, digestible chunks. The HR community around the world has been quick to make use of the technology (see, for example, twitter.com/theofficesnitch or twitter.com/CIPD). Regular tweets keep HR users up to date with practice points and legal developments.