5th Week of Class: Twittering About

I did not have a Twitter account before this assignment. (No podcasts, no RSS feeds...you might be wondering if I even spend any time on the Internet!) I'd heard of the character limit and some people and groups using it but I didn't know any of the details about using it.

Signing up was easy. They even check your username for availability when you stop typing in the text field for it.

What to Tweet

The video on the first Help page tells you, "In general...tweets answer the question 'What are you doing right now?'". The character limit is to keep messages brief. They also suggest tweeting links, questions, and reactions.

Types of Tweets

A normal tweet is public to everyone. You can change your privacy settings so that only people following you can view your tweets. A direct message will send a private message to one person.

You can write a reply to what someone has said by beginning your tweet with '@[username]' (ex. '@bob'). This is called an '@reply'. If you put the '@[username]' anywhere else in the tweet it is considered a 'mention'. An @reply, unlike a direct message, is public to everyone.

It is a convention on Twitter to place the letters 'RT', short for retweet, somewhere in a tweet that quotes an existing tweet. This is not an official function of Twitter or even a rule but probably a good idea so that people don't think that others are trying to take credit for something they said.

Limits on Tweeting

While you can delete a tweet you can not edit them. If there's something you want to change you'll have to remove the whole thing and retype it. HTML is not allowed for security reasons but they'll change an URL to a link for you.

What not to Tweet

There's the obvious things that are banned everywhere: Spam, phishing, malware, illegal activities and the promotion of illegal activities, violent threates, private/confidential information, impersonation, copyright violations, and trademark infringement.

You may not use the 'Verified Accounts' badge without Twitter's approval.

The only potential surprise in what you may not do is that Twitter's definition of 'private and confidential' is a bit broader than other companies' definition. A street address falls under the category of private/confidential on Twitter whereas on other sites they might just say, "Hey, it's in the public domain".

This is clearly to prevent harassment. They do not want people blasting someone's contact information along with the message "Get 'em!" Unfortunately, they do not state how this is enforced. They may not mind people tweeting an address for anything other than a private residence but they might not want street addresses on Twitter at all.

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NEWS: Twitter eliminates certain kinds of users with a Terms of Service update