There are actually two 800-pound gorillas of the social media world. Facebook is one; the other is Twitter.
Who would have thought that a service whose articles are limited to 140 characters would become a mega-success with hundreds of millions of members?
But that very limitation is precisely what inspires Twitterites. The length limit forces you to be concise, encourages you to be witty, permits you to skim through dozens or hundreds of messages (“tweets”) whenever you get a moment.
Twitter is like the transcript of a global cocktail party. Headlines, gossip, jokes, and opinion tear through Twitter like shock waves. News breaks there hours before the “real” news organizations even hear about it.
Twitter is not easy to dive into. But you’ll find it easier than most people do—because these are the Twitter Basics.
Whom to follow
If you sign up for your free Twitter account and then just stare at the screen, you’ll be bored out of your mind. You’ll receive only the tweets of people you’ve followed—people whose tweets you’ve asked to get.
That’s why, when you first sign up, Twitter offers you a few lists of people it thinks you might want to follow: famous people, people in fields like photography and music, and people you know, based on your online address books (Gmail, Facebook, and so on). By the time you’re done, you’ll already be following at least 15 people or so.
You’re ready to start doing Twitter. Log in to Twitter.com whenever you have a moment, and just scroll through the accumulated messages. Over time, you’ll build a bigger list of interesting people to follow; you’ll unfollow boring or offensive people; and before long, you’ll find yourself right at home.
What all the symbols mean
Some tweets are self-explanatory, interesting, or amusing, and require no decoding. Here’s one like that: “Eating outside on a blanket is no picnic, let me tell you. Oh, wait. It actually is.”
Others, however, can be baffling at first, thanks to the shorthand people have developed to save space. (It’s that 140-character thing again.)
Suppose, for example, that you see a tweet like this:
“It is hard to spell or type properly. RT@snosk What’s Wrong with Sentimentality? http://j.mp/1n1UTwj”
In that tweet, you can find three Twitter conventions that nobody tells you about:
• @snosk. Everybody on Twitter has a name. Sometimes it’s obvious who it is—@taylorswift13, for example, is singer Taylor Swift. Other times, it’s a little joke; defensive NFL lineman Warren Sapp goes by @QBKilla (“quarterback killer”).
So what about that @ symbol? That just designates a Twitter handle. Any word preceded by @ is a Twitter name.
• RT @snosk. RT stands for retweet. In other words, this guy is repeating (or, all right, retweeting) something somebody else said—in this case, something @snosk said.
It’s polite to use RT when you’re repeating someone else’s tweet, so the masses don’t think your trying to pass off his brilliance as your own.
So in the tweet above, @snosk asked, “What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?” And this tweet answers the question humorously: “It is hard to spell or type properly.”
• http://j.mp/1n1Utwj. That’s a link to a Web page. That’s very common in tweets. People use Twitter to share great stuff they’ve found online. (In this case, clicking on that link would have taken you to a magazine article called, yes, “What’s Wrong with Sentimentality?”—the item that started this whole thing.)
A crash course in hashtags
Many tweets end with creative or peculiar notations like this: #oneliners, or #nyyankees, or #gotwhatideserved. It’s a little baffling, to be sure.
These are called hashtags. That’s Ancient Geek for “labels that people can use to find tweets on a certain topic.”
Suppose, for example, you want to know what everyone in the whole world is saying about the World Series. You can go to Twitter.com, click in the Search box, and type #worldseries. When you press Enter, you’ll see nothing but tweets that mention the World Series. Or, rather, you’ll see tweets that contain the hashtag #worldseries. People tag their tweets with those words just so people can find them later.
Another case: You might be reading along through your tweets—and find an intriguing hashtag (say, #lousypun). You can click directly on that hashtag to see tweets that have the same hashtag.
Those, at least, were the original purposes of hashtags.
These days, though, people make up hashtags that nobody will realistically search. Instead, they use hashtags sardonically, as little phrases that comment on the tweet.
A typical example: “The TV screens on my flight to Hawaii stopped working TWICE! #firstworldproblem.” Meaning, “OK, I realize that sounds like the petty frustration of a rich guy.”
Or you might read: “I could definitely afford a new car—if I win the lottery. #notholdingmybreath.” Get it?
And now, people even use hashtags outside of Twitter. They sometimes even speak them, as in “hashtag Awkward!” or “hashtag FAIL!”
Here’s where things get complicated
If your tweet begins with somebody’s Twitter handle, it will appear in that person’s stream of incoming Twitter tweets, as you’d expect. But it will also appear in the Twitter streams of anyone who happens to be following both of you.
This diagram may make that clear. Then again, it may not.
It’s showing that if you address a message to @Casey, then @Casey will see it. But so will @Chris, @Rocko, and anyone else who’s following both of you.
(Nobody else on Twitter will see any of this. But anybody can find it by searching for it.)
The moral of the story: If you want to say something privately to one person, send it as a direct message, described next.
Send a message privately
Ordinarily, anything you type into Twitter pops up immediately on the screens of anyone who’s following you.
Often, though, you have something to say to only one person. A question, an update, a note of congratulations. Something of no interest to the masses.
In that case, put the letter D in front of what you have to say (either d or D), and then the person’s Twitter name. Like this:
d @BarackObama Hello, sir! I really enjoyed your appearance on Conan.
That’s called a direct message, and it goes directly to the person you’ve identified—on one condition:
That person must be one of your followers.
In other words, you can’t send direct messages to people who aren’t following you. They just won’t get your note. Twitter invented this rule to prevent you from drowning in spammy tweets that clog your timeline. It is, however, a confusing rule. The Twitter global transcript is filled with people saying “@FoxyChique: I can’t DM you because you’re not following me.”
Twitter on your phone and tablet
Most people read Twitter on its Web site, Twitter.com.
But one of the smartest things Twitter Inc. ever did was to let other people write programs that can send and receive tweets. There are Twitter apps for Mac, Windows, and every smartphone and tablet. (Actually, you can get tweets even on a regular cell phone, too—as text messages. That’s why Twitter has the 140-character limit.)
These other apps have many more features. For example, they often let you see your Twitter world in columns. The first one shows incoming tweets from everyone you follow. The second one shows tweets that mention, or are intended, just for you. And the third shows private messages sent to you.
You are by no means a loser if you do all your tweeting on the Web site. This is simply a public-service announcement to make sure you know that Twitter is waiting for you in other places, on other gadgets.