Twitter for Dummies (18 page)

Inserting Links into Your Tweets

Virtually all Twitter users incorporate links into their tweets on a regular basis — by one estimate, 23 percent of tweets contain links. You can insert links to Web pages, blog entries, or even other tweets. The toughest part of including these links is getting them to fit in the 140-character limit while leaving yourself room to say something about why you’re sending the link out in the first place.

The
URL shortener
is a tool that was designed to manage exceptionally long URLs so that they would not “break” in e-mail and so that they’re easier to copy and paste. Twitter and services like it have heightened the need to save space when linking. Sites such as TinyURL.com (
http://tinyurl.com
), is.gd (
http://is.gd
), bit.ly (
http://bit.ly
), and budurl (
http://budurl.com
) automatically shorten a link into a shorter set of numbers and letters that forwards to the original link and can cut the link’s length down by as much as 70 or 80 percent. As of this writing, Twitter uses TinyURL.com by default on its Web site, so many of the links you post will be shortened for you but it’s done after the fact, so you don’t get to use the full 140 characters. Visit one of the other shortening sites for ways to shorten URLs in advance. Shorteners like bit.ly and budurl also track how your link did, showing you how many people clicked through or in some cases, retweeted your link, which is helpful for business and for seeing whether people like what you post.

Most important is to remember to include a short reason for the link (otherwise, your Twitter followers don’t know why they should click it), such as a headline or a hook that tells them why they might want to click. This is a real art. Some of the most popular tweeters have large followings because they’re good at this, and their stream is enjoyable to read. It’s also nice to give credit to a fellow tweeter by typing
@username
if you’re sharing someone else’s tweets or links. Typing
@
followed by a Twitter username automatically links to that Twitter account Profile page so that you can see more about who that person is. It’s context.

If you want to link specifically to one specific tweet, rather than to a user’s account, first click the day and time at the end of the tweet itself to go to the
permalink
page for that tweet. You can then copy that link into a tweet of your own.

Using Your Twitter History and Favorites

If you want to access your Twitter history after you use the service for a while, you may find it a challenge, especially if you’re a frequent tweeter. But you can get your whole history from Twitter in a few ways:

TweetScan (
www.tweetscan.com/data.php
):
A service that can pull Twitter history for any username. Unfortunately, TweetScan only goes back to December 2007, and if you’ve been on Twitter since it first hit the streets in 2006, you probably want to go back farther. Joined since then? You can get your entire Twitter history.

Twistory (
www.twistory.net
):
A cool little application that imports your Twitter history into the Web-based Google Calendar app so that you can view your tweets like a diary. If you tweet a lot, you might feel overwhelmed by so many tweets crammed into such a small space.

Profile page:
You can use the old-school way of seeing your Twitter history by going to your Twitter Profile page and clicking the More button over and over again until you see the tweet you’re looking for. This approach definitely takes some time, though. (And if you really just want the one tweet, searching (
http://search.twitter.com
) might be a lot easier!)

Aggregator:
If you’re a new Twitter user, you can have an aggregator, such as FriendFeed (
http://friendfeed.com
) or SocialThing (
http://socialthing.com
), save your history.
Aggregators
simply combine your Twitter feed together with any feeds you might have on other social sites. Do you share photos on Flickr? Then there is a feed of your pictures. Videos on YouTube? Same thing. It’s kind of like double posting, for insurance purposes.

You can also keep track of some tweets by marking them as
favorites
with the little star icon on the web interface. A drawback to favoriting tweets is that you can’t search within them on Twitter, and Twitter’s team hasn’t said anything about creating a means to do this search.

Instead of using the Twitter Favorites feature, bookmark your favorites by using a tool such as Delicious (
http://delicious.com
), Shareaholic (
www.shareaholic.com
), or FriendFeed. You may find using an outside tool a little more inconvenient than the Favorites feature at first, but you can find the tweets that you mark in more than one way later. Some people even do Favorite Tweets Roundup posts on their blogs every few days, which you can do much more easily by using a bookmarking service, such as Delicious.

Your Feeds, My Feeds, Everyone’s Feeds

We talk more about RSS feeds and what you can do with them in Chapter 8, but we want to introduce a couple of different feeds that you can access and subscribe to right from Twitter.com.

First, every Twitter account has an RSS feed associated with it. To access the RSS feed:

1. Navigate to a user’s Twitter page.

Our account,
@dummies
, is at
http://twitter.com/dummies
.

2. Click the RSS Feed of
@dummies
’s Updates link.

You can find this link near the end of the content on the right sidebar.

Depending on what RSS reader you use, you see a page to subscribe to that feed.

3. If you’ve protected your updates, you need to log into the API (see Figure 7-1).

You gain access to that user’s feed.

Figure 7-1:
Logging into the API to access the RSS feed of a protected user.

If you want to access one single RSS feed with the tweets of everyone that you follow:

1. Navigate to your Twitter Home screen.

Either click the Twitter logo in the upper-left corner or the Home link in the upper-right corner of any Twitter page, or if you’re already logged in, navigate to
http://twitter.com/home
.

2. Click the RSS Feed link.

You can find this link near the end of the content on the right sidebar. (Scroll down until you find it.) The RSS logo appears nearby.

Now, you can access an RSS feed of updates for everyone you follow.

In fact, every page that has some sort of update stream has an RSS update feed associated with it. Alternatively, if your browser supports it, you can click the RSS icon inside the address bar in your browser to access the feed for that page.

We go over the more interesting points of what you can do with Twitter feeds in Chapter 8, including porting them over to an RSS reader so that you can view a stream without having to visit Twitter.com.

Deciphering Twitter Shorthand Code

The more you use Twitter, the more you’re going to want to find quicker ways to do things. Conveniently, Twitter has included a number of shorthand codes that you can use to perform almost any action directly from the What Are You Doing? box. These codes are particularly useful when you’re working from a mobile phone by sending your tweets to 40404 (or your local shot code) using the Twitter SMS (Short Message Service) gateway.

As we talk about in Chapter 3, be careful when using shorthand code! Making a typo when you want to send a direct (private) message can send an update to everyone who follows you. It’s smart to be particularly careful about sending sensitive information via direct messages, just in case. At some point, you might accidentally share something with everyone that you intended only a particular user to see. Best bet? Use the actual message link on a person’s page to send them a direct message.

D – direct message

You can send a direct message right from the Update box by using the following form:

D
username message

In this message,
username
is the username of the person whom you want to direct message, and
message
is any message that you want to send. So, if you want to tell us how great this book is, you type in the What Are You Doing? box: