Twitter employs a purposeful message size restriction to keep things scan-friendly: every microblog 'tweet' entry is limited to 140 characters or less. This size cap promotes focused and clever use of language, which makes tweets very easy to scan, and also very challenging to write well. This size restriction has really made Twitter a popular social tool.
How Does Twitter Work?
Twitter is very simple to use as broadcaster or receiver. You join with a free account and Twitter name. Then you send broadcasts daily, or even hourly. Go to the 'What's Happening' box, type 140 characters or less, and click 'Tweet'. You will most likely include some kind of hyperlink.
To receive Twitter feeds, you simply find someone interesting (celebrities included), and 'follow' them to subscribe to their tweet microblogs. Once a person becomes uninteresting to you, you simply 'unfollow' them.
You then choose to read your daily Twitter feeds through any of various Twitter readers.
Twitter is that simple.
On Twitter, following someone is not necessarily an admission of friendship, but nonetheless affords interaction and conversation — at least in short bursts.
The first step is to understand and master the vernacular. There are certain words and jargon native to Twitter that you may already have heard in passing. These terms and their abbreviations (in parentheses) are essential for understanding the network.
How Does Twitter Work?
Twitter is very simple to use as broadcaster or receiver. You join with a free account and Twitter name. Then you send broadcasts daily, or even hourly. Go to the 'What's Happening' box, type 140 characters or less, and click 'Tweet'. You will most likely include some kind of hyperlink.
To receive Twitter feeds, you simply find someone interesting (celebrities included), and 'follow' them to subscribe to their tweet microblogs. Once a person becomes uninteresting to you, you simply 'unfollow' them.
You then choose to read your daily Twitter feeds through any of various Twitter readers.
Twitter is that simple.
On Twitter, following someone is not necessarily an admission of friendship, but nonetheless affords interaction and conversation — at least in short bursts.
The first step is to understand and master the vernacular. There are certain words and jargon native to Twitter that you may already have heard in passing. These terms and their abbreviations (in parentheses) are essential for understanding the network.
- Tweet: A 140-character message.
- Retweet (RT): Re-sharing or giving credit to someone else's tweet.
- Feed: The stream of tweets you see on your homepage. It's comprised of updates from users you follow.
- Handle: Your username.
- Mention (@): A way to reference another user by his username in a tweet (e.g. @thisblog). Users are notified when @mentioned. It's a way to conduct discussions with other users in a public realm.
- Direct Message (DM): A private, 140-character message between two people. You can decide whether to accept a Direct Message from any Twitter user, or only from users you are following.
You may only DM a user who follows you. - Hashtag (#): A way to denote a topic of conversation or participate in a larger linked discussion (e.g. #AmericanIdol, #Obama). A hashtag is a discovery tool that allows others to find your tweets, based on topics. You can also click on a hashtag to see all the tweets that mention it in real time — even from people you don't follow.
0 comments:
Post a Comment