Twitter tutorial, step by step:

Go to http://www.twitter.com
Click in the lower left where it says "Get started"
Create an account, and they recommend you use your real name
Choose people to follow, either by
- searching for their name
- putting your email address book into twitter to see who is there, which you can do with
  - hotmail
  - gmail
  - some others
- searching for them by name
  - click Find People in the upper right hand corner
  - if you put in a search string, it will match any Twitter user that has those characters in their name
- Here are a few interesting people (or things) to follow
  - Barack Obama (actually it's his staff)
  - John McCain (you KNOW it's his staff)
  - the_real_shaq (Shaquille O'Neal, basketball player, not as fascinating as you might think)
  - coldplay
  - dave matthews
- if you want to see a list of the top people being followed, go to http://twitterholic.com/
  - my friend Jason Scott's CAT, Sockington, is currently #40 on the list. (actually, its not the cat that writes the tweets, it's his staff)
Follow me if you want, at http://twitter.com/617patrick (someday I hope I have a staff)
Go to your home page and start listening to their "tweets"

You'll find a little information that is

interesting
funny
useful for business

You'll also see a lot of junk. In my opinion, this is the biggest problem that Twitter has to solve. You can waste a lot of time reading about someone who "is drinking coffee at the Starbuck's on Main Street". I may care about this for my friends, but not for John McCain, and there's currently no way to tell Twitter that. Some day there will be.

To see my take on Twitter from a business point of view, see the social media speaker's Twitter Tutorial For Business

More later...