What is Twitter?
Twitter- is a social networking and microblogging service. Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on an incredibly wide variety of topics. The rise of Twitter leads to the rise of a large number of Twitter tools for various purposes. Twitter is an information network made up of 140-character messages called Tweets. It’s a new and easy way to discover the latest news (“what’s happening”).
Twitter Terms
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@
The @ sign is used to call out usernames in Tweets, like this: Hello @Twitter! When a username is preceded by the @ sign, it becomes a link to a Twitter profile.
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Direct Message
Also called a DM, these messages are private between only the sender and recipient. Tweets become DMs when they begin with ” d username” to specify who the message is for.
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Favorite
To favorite a Tweet means to mark it as one of your favorites by clicking the yellow star next to the message.
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Follower
A follower is another Twitter user who has followed you.
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Following
Your following number reflects the quantity of other Twitter users you have chosen to follow on the site
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Handle
A user’s “Twitter handle” is the username they have selected and the accompanying URL.
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Hashtag
The # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Was created organically by Twitter users
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Retweet
A Tweet by another user, forwarded to you by someone you follow. Often used to spread news or share valuable findings on Twitter.
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Tweet
The act of posting a message, often called a ” Tweet”, on Twitter.A message posted via Twitter containing 140 characters or fewer.
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Tweeter
An account holder on Twitter who posts and reads Tweets. Also known as Twitterers.
- Unfollow
To cease following another Twitter user. Their Tweets no longer show up in your home timeline.
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URL Shortener
URL shorteners are used to turn long URLs into shorter URLs. Shortening services can be found online
Lesson 1: How to sign up on Twitter ?
Simply navigate to https://twitter.com/signup this will take you to the main signup page. The first field you will be asked to fill out is your full name. Next, you will be asked to select a username. Try to pick something that describes you – whether it’s a nickname, an interest, or a hobby. You can change your username in your account settings at any time, as long as the new username is not in use. Usernames must be fewer than 15 characters in length, and cannot contain ‘admin’ or ‘Twitter’ in order to avoid brand confusion. Once you have entered a sufficiently strong password, provide an email address. Twitter uses this to confirm your account before you can finish the signup process. The next step is to prove that you’re a human by typing in the words shown in the Captcha before hitting the “Create my account” button. If you are having difficulty reading the words, you may request a new captcha, or you can select an audio captcha.
Next is Finding Sources That Interest You-Because Twitter is more useful and fun when you’re getting regular updates relevant to your interests, twitter asks you to select some of your interests from the left-hand side of the screen. You’re almost done! The final step of signup is to search for anyone else you would like to add on Twitter.
Lesson 2: Twitter Profile & account settings
- Change your picture in the 5th tab of your account settings page, the ” Profile” tab. Your picture can be up to 700k, and we support JPG, GIF, and PNG formats. Twitter no longer supports animated. GIF files.
- Background images must be in PNG, GIF, or JPG format, smaller than 800k. If your image’s file size is too large, the easiest way to get it down is to use an image editing program or web app to shrink the image. In the top navigation bar, click Settings, Click the furthest tab on the right, labeled Design. Select a template by clicking on it, or upload your own background image by clicking “Change background image.”Save your changes when done.
- How do I find your user ID?- Your user ID can be found in several ways: Click the rss icon in the right end of your browser to show your feed address in a feed reader , and note the number at the end of the rss feed, Hover over the rss button on your home, profile, or replies page to show the feed address at the bottom of your browser; your user ID is the number before ” .rss” . Click the rss box at the bottom of your home, profile, or replies page and look for the number at the end of the URL that pops up in your browser; it’s the number before “.rss”.
Follow people on Twitter- You can follow people in a variety of ways: via the web, vis SMS/text message, via the mobile website (mobile.twitter.com), or from many third-party applications.
Unfollow people- you can unfollow people from your following page or from the profile page.
URL Shortening -There are a variety of websites that can shorten your long links, making them easier to fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit. These services can provide you with a shorter version of any URL you want to share. Then, you can use the shorter version in your Tweet, and anyone who clicks on it will be redirected to the longer URL. Some url shortening services are , http://bit.ly , http://tinyurl.com,
Share a photo or video on Twitter- If you’d like to share a photo or video on Twitter, it must first be uploaded on a third-party website before it can be shared with your followers, as Twitter does not currently host any content other than Tweets.
To share an Image, upload it to:Twitpic
Yfrog
TweetPhoto
Pikchur
Twitgoo To share a video:
YouTube
Vimeo
Twiddeo
Twitc
Twitlens
Tweetube
Direct (Private) Messages
-In addition to public updates and @replies, you can send followers private tweets, called direct messages, too. If someone is following you, you can send a direct message from the web via the “message” link on the profile page, but you cannot send a direct message to a user who is not following you.- Delete a tweet – If you’ve posted something that you’d rather take back, you can remove it easily. When you hover over your update when viewing your home or profile page, you’ll see a star and a trash can at the end of the update. The star is for marking the update as a favorite, and the trash can is for removing it.
- Twitter Search is an incredible tool that allows you to find virtually anything and anyone by adding the ability to search for keywords, locations, phrases, and more. Type in any word and you’re guaranteed to get real-time results.
- Retweeting – Sometimes you come across a Tweet that you just have to share- Tweets can be a big deal when they’re newsworthy, informative, or even just really funny. Just hover over a Tweet, click the retweet link, and you’re done!
Tips:-
- Automatic update of Twitter feed – An application that will allow you to update Twitter every time your blog or website has an update is an easy way to handle the Twitter account. A free application is available there called Twitterfeed specifically for posting an automatic update to Twitter every time your blog updates.
- Tweeting with your location – Because tweeting with your location in Twitter is disabled by default for everyone, you must first make sure you have enabled tweeting with location from your Account Settings. Once you’ve enabled it, applications will be able to tag a tweet with your exact location. You can always disable it and remove all location history from the Settings page.
Twitter Applets and Tools
- Twhirl – Runs on both Mac and Windows machines. This Twitter Desktop application allows you to see and respond to tweets using a decent size windown on your desktop.
- TweetDeck – Allows you to split your Tweet main feeds into specific topics or groups in column formats. This application creates a local database of all your Tweets. It allows you to continue posting Tweets even when offline.
- Twunami (Officially retired-Domain for sale now) – A feature-rich Twitter desktop application which boasts of the following basic functionalities – configurable Tweet workspace, optional persistent reminders, on click Tweet/Retweet/SuperTweet/SuperRetweet, threaded tweets, threaded DMs, mark Tweets as read/unread, sort tweets by newest or oldest, and definitely so much features.
- Twitpic , an app that lets users share photos on Twitter. Tweetdeck, is a Twitter app that streamlines notifications and tweets. Digsby, an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program. The one of the most popular app, Twitterfeed, offers to automatically tweet posts published on a user’s blog using RSS. A Twitter user ranking site, Twitterholic, is also the most popular application, with 147,164 people visiting monthly.
- Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.
- Twitter Karma – makes up for its simple design by providing a quick solution to see all of your friends and followers sorted in a variety of ways.
- FriendOrFollow – Another Twitter tracking app for a simple sorted visualization of your friends and followers is FriendOrFollow. It’s a fast way to find all of the people you follow who aren’t following you back.
- ReFollow – provides a slew of features for any power user. You can view not only your friends and followers, but those who are friends or followers of any other particular user, or any user who has ever @mentioned you. These can all be sorted by last tweet, tweet count, alphabetical by username, or their friend/follower counts.
- Twittangle – allows users to form groups to better manage who they follow, or who’s following them. It also displays your friends and followers with a unique column view.
- Tweepler – takes a different, visual approach by presenting two “bucket” columns that you “process” your followers into. This allows you to assign certain followers into an ignore state that you don’t wish to follow back.
- Twitterless – will graph your follower history over time and inform you of the users that stop following you. You can filter your friends and followers with keywords, words in their descriptions, or their location in relation to you.
- Tweepi – delivers a mathematical breakdown to help you decide if you have spammers or deadbeats among your friends and followers that you need to purge.
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Twerpscan – is self-dubbed “anti-fool contact management”, which serves as a concise description of yet another visual solution which assists you in listing and sorting your network of friends and followers. The “Drilldown” feature allows you to research more about users, while the management tools present lists with ratios, tweet counts, and other info to decide who stays and goes.
Twitter Organization
Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts
Multi-account Twitter reputation management for corporate users.
Twitter for Companies
Helps teams manage one or more Twitter accounts by providing tweet assignments, notes, and on duty status.
Twibs is the Twitter Business Directory. This directory of twitter businesses has over 26247 businesses who twitter.
GroupTweet is a service that works behind the scenes with Twitter to allow users to form groups and communicate within those groups.
Firefox Plugins
Twitbin is an Add-on for Firefox that allows you to keep up with all your twitter conversations directly from your browser.
- Echofon for Firefox (formerly Twitterfox )
Echofon for Firefox is an extension that adds a tiny icon to the status bar. It notifies you when friends post tweets.
Top Twitter Lists
Global and local top 1000 listing of the best Twitter users and celebrities based on followers, following and tweets.
Calculate the indirect influence of you and your followers on Twitter!
Twitter Counter – Twittercounter tracks statistics of more than 10 million Twitter users .
Finally
Twitter is one of the best application available on the internet to share short information on the internet with 140 character long message.There are some other microblogging services are available like Facebook, identi.ca, Jaiku, NotePub, Qaiku etc.
What will you do if you see a Fail Whale ?
When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message image created by Yiying Lu, illustrating several red birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”
