Twitter for Dummies (12 page)

If you have a particular user in mind and you’re not sure if you’re following him, go that person’s Twitter page. If you’re following him, under his avatar, you’ll see the “Following.” If you’re not following him, you’ll see a Follow button, which you can click to follow him.

After you break the 100-following mark, you probably want to find another method for figuring out whom you follow. You can figure out whom you follow in a few ways, using third-party applications built on Twitter’s API, which we cover in Chapter 9.

Figuring Out Who’s Following You

You may also want to see who’s following you on Twitter — maybe you want to find new people to follow, or you’re just curious who’s reading your tweets. You can pull up the list of your followers on any Twitter page. Find the sets of numbers in the upper-right sidebar labeled Following, Followers, and Updates, and click Followers.

Similar to the Following link (which we talk about in the preceding section), it brings up a list of people who are following you. Twitter sorts the list with the people who’ve started following you the most recently at the top.

Just like the Following list, you have to click through the Followers list page by page. Chapter 9 suggests some tools, such as TwitterKarma (
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma
) and FriendorFollow (
http://friendorfollow.com
), that can show you both who you’re following and who’s following you, which is considerably easier than scrolling through your followers page by page.

If you don’t want to have to constantly use a site such as FriendorFollow to keep up with your followers, you have several options:

Turn on e-mail notifications in the Settings area.
Click the Notices tab, check the Email When Someone Starts Following Me check box, and click Save. The e-mail notification authorizes Twitter to send you an e-mail alerting you about each new follower. Then, you can just click a link in the e-mail to that user’s profile and see right away whether you want to follow them back.

Try to send a user who may be following you a direct message.
If she is following you, you’re able to send that direct message. If that user isn’t following you, you get a User Does Not Follow You error message (as shown in Figure 3-7). Then you have to decide whether you want to try to get that user’s attention in another way. Be sure to check for the Action message on her actual Profile page when you do so, as the Direct Messages interface has been buggy in the past.

Figure 3-7:
A notification of a direct message failure.

Looking at What You’ve Tweeted

You can see what you’ve tweeted in the past in a variety of ways. The first place to check is your own profile: Click the Profile link in the top-right corner navigation bar (or just click your avatar) to open your Profile page. Your Profile page, in addition to displaying your short bio and profile information, displays a feed of all your public tweets in chronological order. Just like the pages showing your followers and who you follow (which you can read about in the preceding sections), you can keep clicking the More button on the bottom of the page to see older posts.

Also, your profile is a publicly accessible URL. If your username is
@dummies
, navigate to
http://twitter.com/dummies
to jump directly to your Profile page.

If you’re looking for a specific tweet, you can first look for it by using Twitter’s search page (
http://search.twitter.com
). Do a search for your username — if it’s a common name, you might want to include the @ — plus a keyword from the tweet. The tweet you’re looking for is most likely in the search results. Figure 3-8 shows a Twitter Search results page.

If you protect your updates, searching by using Twitter Search doesn’t work because the tweets aren’t indexed in the search engine. It’s a small price to pay for privacy.

You can also search for specific tweets by using Google or another search engine. In our experience, Google tends to update its index against Twitter.com very often and also offers advanced search terms so that you can really focus the search. Additionally, Google’s search interface makes it possible to see who else is talking about your tweets, in addition to the tweets themselves.

Google does such a good job of indexing Twitter that it remains (at this writing) the best way to find out whether someone is on Twitter or not. At Google.com, run a search for Firstname Lastname Twitter, and usually you can find out right away whether a person is a tweeter. Bear in mind that very famous people who appear to be tweeting may be fan pages or other hoaxes, though — unless
@DarthVader
actually does exist, in which case, be very afraid!

Your public tweets are indexed by search engines. You can delete your tweets on Twitter by clicking the Trash Can icon, but if you don’t do it within a few seconds, Google and other search engines, as well as Twitter’s own search tool, have already indexed those tweets. So, sometimes tweets are forever. On one hand, this indexing is good for your visibility online. Because Google and other search engines index your tweets, those search engines can bring more people to your Twitter profile, which can then possibly bring those people to your Web site. On the other hand, you need to be cautious: Don’t say anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t want your mom, your boss, or your child to stumble across later on the Internet while searching for something else. Also take great care with names, as tweets about a person may actually show up closer to the top of search results than mentions of her name on other types of Web sites.

If you imagine that someone whose opinion you value is looking at what you write, you can avoid getting in any trouble. Twitter is so easy to use that it’s equally easy to slip up, and because of its conversational nature, you can sometimes forget that it isn’t a private room, and that it isn’t an “inner monologue.” A Ketchum PR executive famously upset his client — FedEx — when he tweeted a snide remark about Memphis on landing there for his meeting with them. Ooops! Remember the context you’re tweeting in (he was on a client visit) and also remember that people may assume that you’re talking about them when you’re not. You also may not be thinking today about what may be findable weeks, months, and years from now.

Figure 3-8:
Twitter Search (formerly known as Summize) results.

Chapter 4

Using Twitter Wherever You Think Best

In This Chapter

Getting with the Twitter program

Considering third-party interfaces

Using Twitter everywhere

Twitter’s a great tool for providing friends, family, and followers with updates on what’s going on in your life. But, as you’ve probably noticed, life occurs in a lot of places, not just on the computer. Don’t worry, though, because Twitter’s got you covered. The folks at Twitter have designed their application so that you can use it in multiple ways.

In this chapter, we go over all the ways that you, as an individual, may want to use Twitter, and we also give you some pointers for maximizing the application, based on your needs.

The User Multi-Face: Interacting with Twitter Every Which Way

If you want to get the most out of Twitter, you need to figure out how you prefer to access the service. Some people use the Twitter Web site or the Twitter Mobile Web site, text messaging, or any number of third-party services built by using Twitter’s application program interface (API). You can use widgets, gadgets, browser plug-ins, and in short, a huge array of ways to interact with Twitter at your convenience and on your terms. This is a big reason for Twitter’s popularity.

Like most users, you probably started by logging into Twitter.com and using the basic Web interface, shown in Figure 4-1, to manage your Twitter stream and communicate with your contacts. It’s simple, no-frills, and convenient: Most of what you need is right there in the sidebar or in the top toolbar, and roughly half of all twitterers (probably more now with Twitter’s extraordinary recent growth) use Twitter.com to access the service. But what happens if you need more functionality, mobility, versatility, or you just want more bells and whistles?

Figure 4-1:
The Web interface, which is just one of the ways you can use Twitter.

Some Twitter users prefer not to access the service through a browser window, need a few more organizational options than the Web page affords, or just want to share Twitter on an external Web site or blog. You can find plenty of options out there for doing all this and more.

Text messages (SMS delivery)

You can fairly simply opt into receiving Twitter via text messages (SMS delivery). First, you have to set up a mobile device so that Twitter knows where to send your tweets:

1. Click the Settings link at the top-right of your Twitter Home screen.

The Settings page opens.

2. Click the Devices tab.

3. Enter your mobile phone number in the text field, check the box granting Twitter permission to send you a text message, and click the Save button.

You’re given an alphabetical code and instructed to text this code from your phone to 40404.

4. Send the code from your phone as a text message to 40404.

You’ll receive a text message from Twitter confirming that your device has been verified and SMS alerts have been enabled.

5. Refresh the page until you see your cellphone number listed.

Now, you can choose to have text-message notifications on, off, or direct messages only. You can also opt to have them turned off during a specific time (say, while you’re usually sleeping or at work).

6. Turn on SMS device updates for your Twitter account and then click Save.

In the Device Updates drop-down list, select On if you want to receive tweets as text messages on your phone or direct messages if you would like to receive only your direct messages. Then click Save.

7. (Optional) Select a sleep period when you prefer not to receive updates and click Save.

If you’re enabling device updates, but you don’t want them coming in 24 hours a day, under the heading Sleep, select the Turn Off Updates During These Hours check box and select the hours during which you don’t want to receive updates on your phone. Click Save when you’re done.

8. Choose whose device updates you want to see.

Click Home and then click Following (or just go to
www.twitter.com/friends
) to view a list of the people you follow. When device updates are on for your account, you’ll see toggle buttons next to each person on your following list.

Make sure that your cellphone carrier has an unlimited text-messaging plan — or that you’re willing to pay for a lot of extra texts — before setting Twitter device notifications to On. Twitter doesn’t charge for texts, but your carrier might! Laura has unlimited texting even though she doesn’t receive any text updates from Twitter, because she loves to use the text commands to add people, send tweets, and send direct messages.

You don’t automatically receive device updates from everyone you follow on Twitter. You have to manually turn these device updates on for each individual. To check and see whether any given individual is set to device updates ON or OFF:

1. Go to that user’s profile on Twitter.

You can access a user’s profile by clicking the user’s
@username
in one of his tweets.

2. Just under their avatar photo look for the device updates status.

The red dash and OFF means you won’t get this person’s tweets as SMS messages even when SMS device updates are turned ON for your account. The green check and ON means that you will.

3. Turn an individual’s device updates on or off.

First, enable all device updates on your phone. Then on Twitter.com, select your Following link (
www.twitter.com/friends
), and you can toggle Device updates On and Off for many users at a time right on one page.

Of course, you can also control this setting using SMS on your phone. Send an
on username
message to turn Device updates on and
off
username
to turn them off.

If you forget who you’ve set to receive mobile device updates from, you can always go to the list of people you’re following by clicking Following (see Chapter 3 for more instructions) to find that information. It’s listed underneath the person’s username. If you turn device updates off, you won’t be able to view it, but the information is still there and will reappear when device updates are turned back on for your account.

RSS feeds

You can receive updates from Twitter via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, much like you would for any blog or news Web site that you follow.

An RSS feed delivers the content to you so that you don’t have to constantly be logged into the Web page. You just need a way to see the feed: Most people use something called a feed reader. You don’t have to know much about technology to get one of these and set it up. You can choose from many feed readers out there, but we recommend Google Reader (
http://reader.google.com
). You already have one of these accounts if you use Gmail, Picasa, iGoogle, or other Google-owned services. Follow Google’s pretty easy instructions to get started with Google Reader. Then come back to Twitter and set up your RSS feeds.

What can you see with a Twitter RSS feed? You can set up a feed for your @replies so you never miss a message, one for your DMs (direct messages), or one for the people whom you follow. After you get your RSS feed reader set up, you just have to look for the feed symbol in your browser’s URL entry field (see Figure 4-2), click it, follow the instructions, and the feed shows up in your feed reader.

Figure 4-2:
An RSS button, which varies by browser.

The feed symbol is universal, not unique to Twitter. If you see one on a Web site, that means you can add its content to your feed reader.

To get your @replies RSS feed:

1. Click the Profile link in the upper-right of any Twitter page.