When ABC ordered nine more episodes of freshman comedy "Modern Family," officially giving it a full 22-episode season, the news came not from a network press release but from the horse's mouth.

"A great day," executive producer Steve Levitan wrote on Twitter. "Modern Family just got picked up for the back 9!"

Over at "Cougar Town," which got the same good news, word came from "VDOOZER," who happens to be executive producer Bill Lawrence. "Cougar Town — official back 9 order," he wrote, coming in well under his space allotment even with the addition of two exclamation points.

Twitter, a social-networking website co-founded in 2006 by St. Louis native Jack Dorsey, limits users to 140-character bursts of information, called tweets. While some users do tweet everything from their lunch menu to their adorable child's potty-training progress, it's the instant news and real-time reactions that have turned Twitter into a pop-culture phenomenon.

Maybe you heard that Elizabeth Taylor announced her recent heart surgery in a tweet, or that former "Charlie's Angel" Jaclyn Smith used Twitter to dispute a report that she'd shot herself while on vacation. They are just two of the estimated 50 million people with active Twitter accounts, including 8 million new users every month.

Because Twitter users create a list of those whose updates they see automatically, Twitter lends itself to forming communities of people with a common interest, and that's just what has happened for those who write for television, write about television or just watch television.

Twitter is TV's new water cooler, suggests Shawn Ryan, creator of "The Shield" and executive producer of Fox's "Lie to Me."

Last week, Ryan alerted his Twitter followers when he received a call from a friend on the "Southland" set that NBC had pulled the plug before the Season 2 premiere. Those followers, who include industry insiders and TV critics across the country, picked up the news and had it confirmed within minutes.

Ryan signed up for Twitter early on, "but till this year I didn't really want to get involved," he said last week from his office in Los Angeles. Then he took to heart a comment that people can either choose to ride a wave of technology or be left behind.

"I decided that maybe I'd embrace this, whether it was going somewhere or just a fad," he said. "I'm interested in the TV world, so I follow other writers and producers and any TV critic I can find. Also, I like to follow people who are funny."

Fans of Ryan's shows are welcome to follow him, and if they do they'll get insights such as this one after the "Southland" cancellation: "This is an awful story for people like me."

For blogger Daniel Malen, Twitter is a way to get and share news as it happens. By posting links, he also attracts new users to his website, theTVAddict.com, which draws as many as 300,000 unique visitors a month.

"The greatest thing about Twitter is that it's a direct line to what a showrunner is thinking," Malen said via e-mail from his home base in Toronto. "There's no network or PR flack to filter out what may be perceived as a negative."

Calling Twitter his new "Entertainment Tonight," Malen said that by hand-picking his favorite TV journalists and bloggers, he could get "the most insightful, relevant and fun TV news as it happens." Twitter also offers "a really unique behind-the-scenes window into the world of television as one follows writers, producers and actors into the writer's room and onto the set."

Not everything on Twitter is gospel; rumors and misinformation are common even when the sources are reliable. "Bones" executive producer Hart Hanson created minor hysteria recently when he tweeted that production had been shut down by swine flu. The post was repeated ("retweeted") over and over before Hanson corrected himself; the illness wasn't swine flu after all, and production resumed the next day.

But cases of anonymous people impersonating the famous are less common than they used to be. Twitter has verified many accounts, and as usage grows, it has also become more self-policing, with friends and colleagues jumping in to warn of impersonators.

That's not to say everyone is who the user name says.

When "Lost" executive producer Damon Lindelof decided to join Twitter, he couldn't get his real name; it was taken by a user who wasn't pretending to be him, but just an admirer. Lindelof tweeted as TheRealDamon until the faux Damon volunteered to hand over the user name.

"Lost" fans who follow Lindelof or executive producer Carlton Cuse will be reassured that work is happening on the new season via such tweets as this one, from Cuse: "Working late w/Damon writing scenes. I'm listening to JN Howard's score for 'The Happening.' Appropriately moody for these scenes."

Writers typically do a lot of complaining about writing. Kevin Williamson, creator of "Vampire Diaries," offers a lot of updates like this: "In my office. Door shut. Writing."

But fun goes on behind the scenes, too. Bill Prady's CBS comedy, "The Big Bang Theory," has grown into such a big hit that Prady had time for a Twitter prank, saying last week that if he reached 7,000 followers he would put "Big Bang" writer Steve Molaro into the office minifridge. When his follower count reached 7,431, Prady made good on his promise, even posting a picture.

Like most other Twitter users, Ryan finds it both a welcome break from work and a little bit of an obsession.

"I have it on my iPhone," he said, "and I'm constantly refreshing."