Before the whole social networking revolution that has occurred of the last decade, it was hard to voice your opinion to the world unless you were rich, powerful, or people already had some pre-determined interest in you as a person, like being famous.  Thanks to the internet, your potential influence to the world is not as limited as it once was.  Twitter has become one of the biggest online communities on the internet and its all powered by the voice of the people.  Now this doesn't mean you can hop on to Twitter and expect one million followers.  However, it is a media outlet that allows us to show what we are interested, see who is interested in us, and build our own communities.  Twitter news feeds are our own personalized information outlets.  Twitter is not about how much money or power you have in the real world.  An article called Analyzing Influence on Twitter made me realize that the community can give back by showing how interested they are in what you are saying.  Anyone can follow someone they want in their  Twitter 'community.'  Mentioning other users on Twitter will attract attention from the user being mentioned as well as the community.  It gives people a chance to choose who they want to influence them.  The article showed that Mashable was more influential on Twitter than CNN.  It's a world where you get feedback from how much effort you put into your followers.  Twitter is a place for listening, absorbing information, learning, and sharing.