Twitter asks, "What are you doing?" But it turns out that the service is also excellent for sharing URLs to the great things you're reading, watching, hearing, cooking and playing.

In addition to helping other people find cool stuff, there's a self-interested good reason to link liberally: your messages that contain well-described, cool links are most likely to be retweeted. Plus, if you regularly share great links on a topic, people will come to see you as a resource, which can boost your professional reputation.

From the examples here, you can see that 140 characters is plenty of space to create a compelling pointer to a web page and include a shortened URL. (We discuss URL shorteners in Chapter 1 and Chapter 6.)