Twitter for Dummies (9 page)

If the default themes or images don’t appeal to you, or if you’re looking for something simpler or more casual, you can find free background images at sites such as TwitterPatterns (
www.twitterpatterns.com
). TwitterPatterns offers a variety of pattern graphics to choose from, all of which are sized specifically to fit Twitter profiles. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can hunt online for interesting background images on your own and upload them yourself. Just make sure that they’re the right shape and size.

Your background image is almost always overlaid with your Twitter stream, so people usually won’t be able to see the middle of the image. Their screen width dictates how much of your background they’ll actually see.

Using your background image to expand your profile

Because Twitter’s user profiles are so limited, some avid Twitter users take advantage of the background image to add more information or personal links than Twitter allows for in its short Bio section. In many cases, a Twitter user includes a short professional biography, accompanied by more links and ways to connect with that user (see Figure 2-8). This idea is a great way to let people know where else they can find you.

To customize your background image, you need to use a custom template application or create your own template from scratch by using a program such as Photoshop or a free image editor such as Gimp or Seashore. You can also use Microsoft’s PowerPoint.

If customizing your own background image from scratch isn’t your speed, don’t worry! Several sites generate free Twitter templates that are designed just for Twitter neophytes in your situation. One of these sites is TwitBacks (
www.twitbacks.com
), which offers you a fill-in-the-blanks form to create your own Twitter background. Alternatively, you can grab a template from BoinBlog (
http://boinblog.com/2008/07/02/twitter-profile-customization-photoshop-template
). You need Photoshop on your computer to open the file, but it’s a fast and easy way to create a template for yourself or your company if you’re pressed for time.

Adjusting Your Text-Messaging Settings

By using Twitter cellphone notifications, you can keep tabs on your friends, your spouse, or someone who randomly says the funniest things. Some users, though, are more inventive: They use this feature to keep tabs on their current client roster to try to gauge those clients’ happiness levels before calling them for project updates.

You can interact with Twitter on your cellphone via Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, on a mobile Web site, or by using a client application on your smartphone. You can opt for tweet notification from your network in several ways, as well.

Before you can do anything with your new Twitter account on your cellphone, though, you have to associate your mobile device with Twitter. Like most things about Twitter, it’s pretty easy to do.

To associate your cellphone with Twitter, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Twitter and click the Settings link in the top-right menu bar of your Twitter home page.

The Settings page opens.

2. Select the Devices tab.

3. Enter your cellphone number in the text box and select the check box below it to confirm that you allow Twitter to send messages to your phone; click Save.

A screen appears giving you a code that you need to text to 40404 (brief instructions are provided).

4. Send the code to 40404 from your cellphone.

5. On the right side of your Twitter home page, under Device Updates, click the Phone radio button.

If you find the notifications overwhelming or need to stop them for a while, just turn them off, which we talk about in the following section.

You can turn on cellphone notifications even more easily if you sign up for Twitter by texting a message to 40404. But if you’ve already signed up at the Web site, use the Web site to add your phone. If you sign up both on the Web site and by using your phone, you end up with two accounts that aren’t connected to each other.

Controlling the text-message flow

If your account has text-messaging device updates set to On, you receive a text message each time someone in your network sends a tweet. (To find out how to turn on cellphone notifications, see the preceding section.)

At first, receiving text-message updates from all your new Twitter friends is fun. But when your network grows, you may find all those tweets a bit noisy, to say the least — not to mention the fact that your cellphone plan may charge you for each text message you receive. To change this, look at Settings and then the tab called Devices. We give you more detail on what you can adjust, and how to do it, in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7.

Plenty of avid users of Twitter never even receive SMS updates; others swear by them. Part of the beauty of Twitter is the many different ways that you can access it. You always have a choice.

You can also set quiet time, which (in our opinion) is a very underrated feature. Basically, quiet time can ensure that your phone doesn’t wake you up in the middle of the night when tweets come in from the other side of the world.

To set up quiet time, follow these steps:

1. Click the Settings link on the top navigation bar.

The Settings page opens.

2. Select the Devices tab.

3. Select the check box labeled Turn Off Updates During These Hours.

4. In the drop-down menus directly below the check box, select the times between which you don’t want text messages to come into your phone.

5. Click Save.

Selecting your text notifications, person by person

If you start following hundreds of people, you probably don’t want to receive text-message tweets from all of them. Thankfully, Twitter lets you receive texts only from users of your choice so that your phone isn’t vibrating and beeping all day.

To turn off device notifications for some of the people you’re following, follow these steps:

1. Go to your following page (
www.twitter.com/friends
).

2. Next to each person that you follow, you have the option to turn their individual device updates On or Off by clicking one of the radio buttons.

3. If you can’t see the device updates On and Off options after each name on your following list, you don’t have device updates turned on for your account. Turn it on and you will be able to adjust each individual’s settings.

Chapter 3

Stroll Around the Grounds: A Tour of the Twitter Interface

In This Chapter

Reading the feed on your Twitter Home screen

Making a Twitter conversation personal by using @replies and direct messages

Marking your Twitter favorites

Viewing who you’re following and who’s following you

Reviewing your past Twitter updates

For the power it wields, Twitter is one of the simplest and, we think, most elegant Web sites for mass communication. The interface makes interacting with other people — some you already know and others you’ll meet — incredibly easy, and it cleanly organizes a lot of information.

As you use Twitter more and more, you may want to know where to locate things quickly and manage your communication flow more intelligently. In this chapter, we dive down into each Twitter page view, showing how it relates to the conversations going on around you and the conversations you’re having directly.

Starting Out on the Home Screen

When you first log into Twitter, the Home screen is your first stop. After you set up your account, you go to this screen to touch base with your followers and the people you’re following. On the Home screen, you can also see who’s talking to you directly through
@replies,
which are public tweets in response to individual users, and
direct messages
(DMs), which are private, one-to-one tweets. (For more on using @replies and DMs, see the sections “Tweeting to One Specific Person: @Replies” and “Shhh! Sending Private Notes via Direct Messages,” later in this chapter.)

Additionally, the controls along the top of the Home screen let you change your settings, update your profile background, upload your avatar, toggle your SMS notifications, and more. (Chapter 2 covers most of these setup features.)

The Home screen, shown in Figure 3-1, has a standard layout. The header has a Twitter logo on the left and a list of links on the right, which appears on all Twitter pages. Those links’ names describe where they take you:

Home:
Your Home screen. Clicking on the Twitter logo at left also takes you to your Home screen.

Profile:
Your Profile page.

Find People:
The people search tool.

Settings:
Where you can configure your Twitter account (see Chapter 2).

Help:
FAQs and support.

Sign Out:
Exactly what you think it is — signing out of your Twitter account.

Figure 3-1:
The Twitter Home screen, where you’ll spend a lot of time.

Twitter is a living Web application. Its interface changes from time to time, so if you can’t find something immediately, it’s likely taken on a different name or moved to a different location on the interface. For up-to-date information about what’s going on with Twitter, visit the company’s blog (
http://blog.twitter.com
).

The sidebar

The area on the right side of most Twitter.com screens (Home, Profile, Replies) is called the sidebar. It’s both a reference for what you’re looking at in the main content area and a controller for the Web site, and it’s configured a little differently in each view. Here’s a breakdown of what’s on the sidebar. Except where noted, this description applies to the sidebar on your Home screen:

Your information:
Your avatar picture and username. When you’re logged in to Twitter and on your Home screen, you’ll see only your avatar and username. Your Name, Location, Web, or Bio appear only on your Profile page. Click your avatar, the Profile link, or any
@username
link for your name to see your Profile page.

Your stats:
Your following and follower counts and the number of updates you’ve posted, followed by a box that displays definitions of various Twitter related words, tools, and services.

Your communications:
@username
is a link to your
mentions
(all the tweets posted by other people that either mention you or are replies to you), and underneath it you will find your Direct Messages, and Favorites.

For more on using favorites, see the section “Playing (Twitter) Favorites,” later in this chapter.

Your searches:
Next is the Search text box, followed by several sections that you can expand to a bigger view or shrink down to a single line by clicking a down or side arrow in a small circle to the right of each heading. As soon as you save a search to refer to it later, Saved Searches becomes the first of these sections.

Trending Topics:
Trending Topics shows you the most commonly tweeted words and hashtags at any given time. The Trending Topics view is a surprisingly powerful peek at what is going on in the world (at least, the world according to twitterers) at any given moment.

Your community:
Following
is the last section on the sidebar, and it shows a grid of the avatar photos of those you follow (or a random sampling of them if you follow more than it can display).

Your community:
A grid that shows a number of avatars from the roster of other Twitter users you follow.

The “What are you doing?” box

Directly atop the wide left column, you find a box in which you can post your latest update. If you continually use Twitter’s Web interface to post updates, you’ll become very well acquainted with that box. (We go over how to update without using Twitter’s update box in Chapter 8.)

You’ve probably noticed a light-gray 140 sitting on top of the upper-right portion of the update box. While you type in your message, that number decreases, letting you know how many more characters you can type before you go over the limit. When you get to 19 characters remaining, the number turns burgundy, and when you get to 9 characters remaining, the number turns red; if you go over 140 characters, the number starts counting into the negatives. If you can’t click the Update button, you’ve likely gone over the limit, so be succinct!

As soon as you type a new tweet and click the Update button, your tweet appears in the area directly below the “What are you doing?” box and in the Twitter feed below that.

If your last tweet was on the long side, you might notice that it was shortened and an ellipsis (. . .) at the end of your tweet. If it was abbreviated, you can click that ellipsis to see your full tweet. If you replied to anyone or included a link in your tweet, you can now click that link. Additionally, the timestamp saying how long ago you posted that update in fact contains that update’s
permalink.
Click that link and a page dedicated to that tweet — and that tweet alone — opens. Cool, huh?

This seemingly subtle fact is a big part of what makes conversations on Twitter different. Unlike IM or a chat room, every single tweet can be uniquely bookmarked, linked to, replied to, and archived. Right now, you can go online and view famous tweets you may have heard about, such as
@JamesBuck
’s “Arrested” at
http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/statuses/786571964
or
@JanisKrum
’s “There’s a plan on the Hudson . . .” at
http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133
.

The Twitter stream

All the action on Twitter, appropriately, lives front and center on your screen. This stream of Twitter updates doesn’t have an official Twitter-sanctioned name. It contains your tweets and the tweets of those you follow in a chronological order, with the most recent tweets at the top.

This update stream goes by several names including stream, timeline, or sometimes feed (not to be confused with RSS feeds, which you can read about in Chapters 4 and 8). Some people who follow thousands of Twitter users call it a river — the tweet stream flows faster the more people you add to your list of friends and the more people you follow.

The stream only “flows” when you refresh your Web browser — it doesn’t automatically display new tweets. Words like stream and flow most likely derive from the more dynamic moving displays on many third-party Twitter clients.

This is where the conversations happen; it’s your home base for connecting with people and businesses on Twitter. By reading your stream, you can find new people to listen to (friends of your friends and connections) and a place to jump in and participate.

Each tweet appears in its own little rectangular box. If you hover your cursor over the box, a Star and an Arrow icon (or, if it’s your tweet, a Star and a Trash Can icon) pop up on the right side of the tweet. These icons act like function buttons:

Star:
Clicking the star button adds that tweet to your Favorites list (which you can get to by clicking Favorites on the sidebar). When you mark something as a favorite, you make it easier for yourself to find that tweet in the future.

Arrow:
Clicking the arrow sets up the tweet entry field so that you can reply to that user with an @reply.

Trash Can:
This icon appears next to only your own tweets. Not surprisingly, clicking it lets you delete the tweet from the feed. (
Note:
If you’re not seeing a Trash Can icon next to your own tweet, odds are Twitter is working on something. Occasionally, the Trash Can icon disappears, and you have to wait to delete a tweet — all the more reason to make sure that you don’t tweet anything you don’t mean to tweet!)

Coming attractions: Retweet?
Ryan Kuder (
@ryankuder
), a popular Silicon Valley entrepreneur on Twitter best known for live-tweeting his layoff from Yahoo! in 2008, recently noticed and captured screenshots of a possible fourth interaction icon in development at Twitter: RT (
www.ryankuder.com/2009/05/is-twitter-making-it-easier-to-retweet
). You can use the RT icon to repeat the tweet you’re reading in Twitter lexicon, to
retweet.
It makes a lot of sense that Twitter would be experimenting with such a feature, as most Twitter clients offer it, and Twitter has historically adapted its product to popular user behaviors.

Tweeting to One Specific Person: @Replies

That little Arrow icon on the Home screen is the force behind one of Twitter’s most powerful conversational features: @replies. Taking its format from a syntax used in text chat rooms, @replies is a tweet that, although public and visible to all Twitter users, is directed specifically to one Twitter user. Twitter has ramped it up by automatically detecting when an @ symbol is placed directly in front of a word (with no space in between) and adds a link to the Twitter user who has that word as his or her handle. More than just a way to direct a tweet to one person, @replies can also help you find new people to add to your network when you see one of your contacts conversing with someone you don’t know and decide to check that person out.