Some readers of The Historian will be users of Twitter and may already follow the Historical Association's Twitter feed https://twitter.com/histassoc

For those who are not, Twitter is an on-line social networking and micro blogging service that enables users to send and read tweets, which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets but unregistered users can only read them.

Some critics have argued that you can say nothing useful in so few characters, but consider Cicero. If he had been a Twitter user he could have tweeted:

• Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always as a child.

Instead of writing it and he'd still have had 54 characters to spare!

To complement the biography theme of this edition we are running a Twitter historical biography competition. This is open to all members of the HA.

All you have to do is write your Twitter biography, of whichever historical person you choose, and then tweet that biography on 9 May 2014 with the hash tag #HAbiog. This means that you will only have 132 characters to play with. However, using the hash tag will ensure that all your entries can easily be collected and read on the day by the judges and a winner chosen (it may be that we will even manage to be a trending topic for a short while). We will then contact the winner for the details of their membership and address.