Twittering away the elections

Some of my new Spanish blogger friends (well, new friends, they've been Spanish and bloggers a while), are using the Twitter site, software, technology, whatever to follow the US primary results. I've seen Twitter in action and it bewilders me a bit. I'm not even going to try to explain how it works, I'm hoping one of you, our intrepid readers, will explain Twitter to the rest of us in the comments, and then I can link to your comment(s) from this. Anyway, my friend César Calderón explains on his blog (in Spanish, but a bad translation using Google is here) a little about how he and his friends used Twitter to follow and share the results in Iowa, and again are using it tonight to follow New Hampshire. Way over my head - I think they're simply sending results to each other's cell phones via text, not sure - but fascinating stuff. Okay, I just emailed César to ask what they're sending back and forth, and got this response: "Polls, comments, sharing links to interesting pages, chatting, fighting again Republicans.... and of course, live blogging." So, pretty much the little tidbits we'd all share amongst ourselves in the comments, they share by text.