To those of us who’ve made Twitter part of our daily lives and have built extensive networks of friends and associates, it seems hard to believe that just 3.2 million people use the service (according to TwitDir). Compare that to Facebook’s 110 million active users, and you get a sense of how small Twitter is at this time. Still, considering the number of Twitter users has grown around 500% in the past year, there is reason to believe Twitter is going to get quite common in the future.

To the uninitiated, Twitter seems like an odd, time-consuming, and valueless habit. (“Hundreds of complete strangers will read what you post? Why would they do that?”) Although using Twitter quickly becomes instinctive, trying to describe it to someone unfamiliar with the service is monumentally difficult.