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Since its founding in 2006 by Chairman Jack Dorsey, Twitter, the free social networking and micro-blogging website, has become one of the new giants of online social networking. It has also suffered from a critique lobbed at websites like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook before it: pointlessness. Does anybody really need to see 140 characters on what you’re eating for dinner?

Recently, however, politicians like President Obama and companies such as Pepsi and Ford are learning what some people our age have known for years: sites like Twitter can be invaluable tools for social networking. By using Twitter people can build their businesses contacts, collect data, and raise awareness of the projects.

The “what” of Twitter is simple. Users can post short, 140-character text updates. These both appear on their own page and sent to other users (“followers”) who subscribe to them. Likewise, you can subscribe to other users and receive an ongoing feed of their posts (“tweets”) in almost real time. The whole affair is referred to as “tweeting.”

With the rise of Twitter in business, plenty of people like Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, and websites like internet marketing company Flyte.biz and the less-formal SociableBlog have begun offering well-thought out guides to using Twitter to your advantage, sampled below. The basic process is simple, but there’s already a lot out there.

Getting Started

• Go to Twitter.com and register. You’ll need an email address and a full name. Try to keep your profile name respectable. You’re best off using your own name.

• Make sure to add a profile photo and fill out a brief bio. People aren’t going to follow you if you’re just a name.

Networking

• Follow people and they’ll follow you. Keeping up with your friends is a good way to get familiarized with Twitter, but you want to focus on building connections. Link up with coworkers and members of clubs and projects you work with. From there, use websites like Monitter, which lets you search tweets by keywords, and WhoShouldIFollow.com to find people with similar interests and connect with them.

• Post interesting tweets, and regularly. If you want people to get interested in you and/or your organization, you want there to be something interesting to read when they follow you. And since you’re using Twitter professionally, you should be professional. No tweets about what show you’re watching.

• However, part of Twitter’s value is that it presents you as a person and lets you communicate on an equal level. So, depending on what you’re doing, it doesn’t hurt to post the occasional tweet that makes you sound well-rounded person.

Of course, while using Twitter, don’t forget that anyone can follow you. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with, conceivably, every person on Twitter reading. If it’s private, just use a phone.

Finally, make sure to take advantage of the many applications available for Twitter. A few examples are Twittercal, which connects your Twitter with Google Calendar for your convenience, and TweetBrain, which lets you ask questions and get answers from the Twitter community at large. You can find more from the Twitter Fan Wiki’s comprehensive list.

With that, you’re more than ready to begin. Twitter can connect you to colleagues, spread important information to or from you, help you plan and announce events, and really any other social task you can need from it. Regardless of initial misgivings of this seemingly vapid resource, Twitter represents the benefits of living in the future. With the right apps it offers you almost limitless connectivity. Why not take advantage of that?