Twitter: a series of chirps or the high-pitched sound a bird makes.
A birds use its chirps, cheeps, and tweets to warn of danger, scare off predators, find a mate, protect its territory and to identify itself and its friends.

While the online microblogging tool version of Twitter is often dismissed as silly tweets more in line with canary chatter, perhaps we can learn a little from our feather friends. Tweety-bird let us all know when he saw the putty-cat and the online Twitter world lets us tell each other when know when we see things that interest us and cross all interest lines. No question you'll find your share of nonsense and the spammers have already started to move in, but such is the online world wherever you happen to click.

Genome Alberta can be found on Twitter as @mikesgene and we follow, or are followed by a wide range of people and organizations. There is I Am Biotech, one of the communication arms of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) in Washington D.C, Linda Avey one of the founders of 23andMe, PrionGirl who is actually Valerie Sim prion researcher, and Christopher Dieni originally from Montreal, went to school in Ottawa, and is now a postdoc in State College, at Penn State, researching cancer biochemistry.
Not a bad pedigree for a bunch of Twits and the rest of the people we keep in touch through Twitter are no less impressive. They cover the range of interests and careers from the media, to politics, to public relations, to science and medicine.
Every 2 weeks we compile some of the 140 character posting we come across and give you a sample to take you from the lab bench to the online bench. These are just the tip of the iceberg so if you really want to see what lies underneath then sign on to http://twitter.com and follow @mikesgene