Twitter for Dummies (11 page)

3. Type a message in the Send a Direct Message box.

4. Click Send to send the message.

You can send DMs from any regular Twitter input source — text messages, third-party apps, or the main Twitter interface — by entering
d [username]
and then typing your tweet. For example, if you want to send a direct message to our Dummies account (
@dummies
) to ask when the next edition of
Twitter For Dummies
is coming out, you format the DM as
d dummies When’s the next edition coming out?

Sending DMs is easy. But proceed with caution! Many Twitter users have embarrassing tales of DMs that they accidentally sent as public tweets because they formatted the tweet incorrectly or sent it from the Twitter Home screen instead of from the user’s Profile page (best bet) or the Direct Messages page. Double-check, just to be sure.

Playing (Twitter) Favorites

One of the icons that appears when you hover your mouse over a particular tweet is the Favorites star. It’s basically Twitter’s equivalent of a bookmarking tool, and twitterers often overlook it. When you mark a tweet as a favorite, it appears on your Favorites page (see Figure 3-4). You may want to mark a tweet as a favorite to:

Save it for later.

Acknowledge that it helped you or that you found it amusing.

Mark it so that you can reply to it later.

Remember it so that you can reference it in a blog post or article.

Save it to quote later.

Figure 3-4:
Your favorite tweets are stored forever.

Ari Herzog
(@ariherzog
) pointed out that favorites are an untapped opportunity to collect testimonials and other tweets that might have value for your company. Innovation software company Brightidea (
@brightidea
) uses it to curate a great collection of Tweets about innovation, drawing upon Twitter search results for keywords related to innovation.

Our point is, don’t limit yourself to using Favorites only as literal favorites. Use Favorites whichever way works best for you!

If you start using the Favorites icon on a regular basis, you’ll soon have a large collection of tweets that you can gather data from for various projects or reference when you need to remember a particular joke or comment. You can also use it for bookmarking links so that you can visit it later — many of your best links and referrals will come from your fellow Twitter users.

One way to find more people on Twitter is to visit the Profile pages of your friends on Twitter and look at
their
Favorites, to see which tweets they liked the most. If your best friend marked a particular tweet as a favorite, and you’re not yet following the person who posted that tweet, you may want to start following that person.

Becoming a Renaissance Man via the Everyone Tab (RIP)

The Everyone tab used to lead to Twitter’s Public Timeline, which contained all tweets from all twitterers everywhere. It’s no big surprise that the Public Timeline was always pretty crowded and random, and that it became ever more so during the meteoric growth leading up to our publication deadline.

As we go to press, you can peek at the Public Timeline in two ways, neither of which appear anywhere in Twitter’s interface. The original link (
http://twitter.com/public_timeline
) still works for now. Rumor has it that you can also still access the timeline by running a search with no terms in the search box (
http://twitter.com/#search?q=Search
— thanks
@krystyna81
for this tip!) So although the true Public Timeline is gone, for old time’s sake, we left this section in the book for you to play with and think about.

The timeline includes all Twitter users who haven’t opted to protect their updates: people you follow, people you don’t follow, and people who don’t follow you. You can use the timeline to broaden your network, finding new conversations and topics, and generally expanding your presence on Twitter.

If you can get to the Public Timeline through the preceding links, it shows the most recent tweets from everyone who uses Twitter, in real time (like the page shown in Figure 3-5). It looks a lot like your own Twitter stream on your Home screen, but with more content to discover.

After you get to the Everyone timeline, spend a little time either scrolling from page to page and tweet to tweet manually or skimming for interesting conversations. (Refresh your Web browser to see the latest tweets.) If you find an interesting person or conversation, just click that Twitter handle to find out more about that user. You can also send an @reply to the tweet, which lets you just jump into the conversation, even if you don’t yet follow any of the people in it. Or, if you like what you see, you can follow someone without replying to them — follow whoever looks interesting to you!

You can check in on the Public Timeline periodically, even after you start to grow your network into the triple digits and higher. Even people who have thousands in their personal Twitter network can find fresh ideas and interesting people on the Public Timeline once in a while, which keeps their Twitter experience the most varied and interesting it can be.

Seeing Who You Follow

After you start using Twitter to its full potential, you may want to see a list of whom you follow. To see whom you follow:

1. Log in to Twitter.

On any page in Twitter, you find the sets of numbers in the upper-right sidebar labeled Following, Followers, and Updates.

2. Click Following.

A list of people you’re following appears (as shown in Figure 3-6). Currently, Twitter sorts your Following list chronologically by when you started following them, with the most recent at the top.

3. Scroll through the list manually, page by page.

This process works fine until you start to follow many more people. Without a way to sort or search — which Twitter still doesn’t have (hint, hint, Twitter!) — finding out if you follow someone specifically can become tedious after you start following more than 100 people.

Figure 3-6:
Check out the twitterers whom you’re following.