In fact, Mr. Williams said that a huge chunk of Twitter lore, etiquette and even terminology has sprouted up from Twitter users without any input from the company. For example, the people came up with the term “tweets” (what everyone calls the messages). The crowd began referring to fellow Twitterers by name like this: @pogue. Soon, that notation became a standard shorthand that the Twitter software now recognizes. The masses also came up with conventions like “RT,” meaning re-tweet  you’re passing along what someone else said on Twitter.

If you asked me to write my own “Rules for Twitter” document  No. 927,001 on Google  it would look something like this:

DON’T KNOCK IT TILL YOU’VE TRIED IT Of course, this advice goes for anything in life. But listen: even my own masterful prose can’t capture what you’ll feel when you try Twitter. So try it.

If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.

DON’T USE THE WEB SITE I couldn’t believe that six million Twitter users lumber off to a Web page every time they want to send or read tweets. Turns out they don’t. About 70 percent use sweet little free programs that sit at the edges of their screens (or run on their cellphones, especially iPhones) all day. They have names like TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl and Twitterific.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ ALL THE TWEETS It’s common to check out someone’s Twitter profile and read, “Following: 900 people.” Baloney. Nobody has the time to read all the tweets from more than about 30 people  at least, nobody with a life.

Clearly, these high subscribers just read the most recent ones, or skim for good ones, or use search.twitter.com to find messages on certain subjects.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER ALL THE REPLIES If you have a lot of followers, you get a lot of replies to your tweets. Fortunately, this isn’t e-mail; nobody expects you to answer everything.