Twitter is a unique communications service that has been rapidly growing in popularity in recent days. The basic idea is simple: You type 140-character messages, called “tweets,” that are then posted on your page and sent out to all of your “followers” on the service.

The service is an interesting blend of blogging and social networking; college users will recognize a similarity between Twitter’s tweets and Facebook status messages; in fact, Facebook’s recent and highly controversial redesign was characterized by some technology blogs as an attempt to bring the simplicity of Twitter to the news feed page.

However, Twitter’s implementation is geared far more towards getting people connected and trading tweets than Facebook is. This is by necessity, I think; there is much more information on my Facebook profile, where the company has provided all sorts of fields, than there is on my 140-character Twitter page. Therefore, there is less of a barrier towards opening my tweets up to the public.

The uninhibited website opens up a widely diverse network of people for you to follow, including plenty of common folks like me, but also including more interesting people like politicians, executives and celebrities. The fact that you can have easy, one-click access to all of these important people is a fascinating social experiment; although many of these people doubtlessly are using the service as a marketing tool, there are enough that are actually engaged on the site. And for this latter group of VIPs, you can direct tweets to their attention as easily as you could email or IM them — the difference being that you would likely never have access to their personal contact info for these other forms of communication.

Another way to use Twitter is as a way to get your news. Many news organizations, including The Sun, bigger papers like The New York Times, and all sorts of magazines and blogs, are now actively tweeting their top headlines. You can pick and choose the publications you want to hear from and have their stories — along with more timely information, like breaking news updates — pushed out to you throughout the day. You can also tweet back to the publication — something not normally possible with email newsletters or RSS news feeds — to ask questions about stories, submit tips, or suggest coverage. Twitter is providing an easy way for old and new media alike to connect with their readers on a whole new level, and that’s pretty exciting.

Oh, before we close — if you check out Twitter (http://twitter.com) after reading this column, shoot me a tweet (@rayarub). Also feel free to follow The Sun (@cornellsun) for news updates from campus.