Twitter Tips- Sending update from your mobile phone as text.

Sending  update from your mobile phone as text

The next time you’re out and about without a computer in range and a perfectly tweetable thought, idea, or sight comes your way, pull out your trusty mobile phone and perform these almost-too-simple-to-be-true steps to post your update:

 1.  On your mobile phone, access the SMS feature, and then start a new message.

 2.  Use the phone’s text messaging interface to specify that you want the text sent to the Twitter phone number for your locale.

3.  Type your message.  Figure 5.4 shows an example. Notice that the SMS application on my BlackBerry tells me how many characters I have left before I hit 140 in the bar at the top.  Very  sweet.

4.  Send the message. Your phone shoots the message to Twitter, and it then appears on your timeline, usually within a few seconds, as shown in figure 5.5.











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Twitter tips-- Activating Mobile Phone in Twitter account

Activating Mobile Phone in Twitter account

Your first step toward using your phone with Twitter is to activate the phone in your Twitter account. Basically, you let Twitter know your phone number, and it then provides you with a code that you text to Twitter to confirm. Here are the specific steps:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Settings. Your account settings appear.

 3.  Click the Devices tab.

 4.  Type your mobile phone number in the text box.

 On most systems this text box is indistinguishable from the page background, so see figure 5.1 for its location. Precede the number with a plus sign (+) and be sure to include your country code.

5.  Select the It’s okay for Twitter to send txt messages to my phone check box.

6.  Click Save.  Twitter displays a code and tells you to text it to your local Twitter phone number.

 7.  On your mobile phone, access the SMS feature, start a new message, type your local Twitter phone number, enter the code 

supplied by Twitter, and then send the message.Within a minute or two, Twitter sends you the return message shown in figure 5.2.

The next time you load the Devices tab in your Twitter settings, you see the configuration shown in figure 5.3.

I discuss the new controls as you work through this chapter. For now, you’re ready to starting sending updates through your phone!

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Twitter Tips--Following a person’s updates via RSS

If you’re a dedicated blog follower and find yourself spending more time in your RSS reader than just about anywhere else, you might not like the idea of having to access the Twitter site or even sign in to your Twitter account to follow a particular person’s tweets. Similarly, you might be following someone’s tweets and you don’t want to miss a thing while you’re not signed in to Twitter. In both cases, Twitter makes each user’s timeline available in an RSS feed, so you can add that feed to your favorite RSS reader. Twitter even makes it
easy to subscribe to the feed using Live Bookmarks, Bloglines, Google, or My Yahoo!. Here’s how it works:

1.  Sign in to your Twitter account. Actually, this part is optional because you don’t need to be logged in to access someone’s RSS feed. However, if you want to get the feed for one of your friends or followers, then you need to sign in.

 2.  Navigate to the user’s profile page.

3.  In the sidebar, click the RSS feed of username’s updates link, where username is the user’s screen name. Twitter displays the feed,

 4.  Subscribe to the feed. The steps required here vary depending on your RSS reader. The standard technique is to copy the feed URL in the browser’s address bar, navigate to your RSS service, select the option to add a feed, and then paste the feed address.

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Twitter Tips--Automatically following someone who follows you

Following your followers manually isn’t a big deal if you only receive a few friend requests per day. However, if your Twitter profile takes off, you might become insanely popular and start receiving dozens of new followers each day. That’s a nice position to be in, for sure, but you could end up spending vast chunks of your day just processing all those new fans.

To avoid that, you can use a powerful online tool called Tweet Later to automatically follow anyone who follows you. Go to www.tweetlater.com and sign up for a free registration.(There’s a paid version of the service, but you don’t need it for this.)Once you ’ve done that, you add your Twitter account and then configure it to automatically follow your followers.Because Tweet Later is an online service, the interface changes fairly regularly. 

However, here are the steps to follow as I write this:

1.  Log on to your TweetLater account.

2.  Click the +Twitter tab. The Add a New Twitter Acocunt page appears.

3.  Type your screen name in the Twitter User Name text box.

4.  Type your password in the Twitter Password text box.

5.  Select the Auto Follow check box. 

6.  Click Save. TweetLater adds your accounts and configures it to automatically follow your 

followers.

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Twitter Tips--Following Twitter’s suggested users

If you’re really not sure where to start with this following business, then you might want to take a look at Twitter’s Suggested Users page, which lists over 100 Twitter users. The list is a real mixed bag that includes mostly members of the Twitterati (the Twitter elite who have the most followers) — including celebrities, companies, media outlets and personalities, and bands — plus the odd apparently randomly selected tweeter. It’s not exactly personal, but it’s an easy way to populate your friend timeline.





Here are the steps to follow:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Find People. The Find People page appears.

 3.  Click the Suggested Users tab. Twitter displays a list of users.

 4.  Select the check box beside each person you want to follow. Twitter adds the user’s avatar under the You’ll be following heading.

5.  Click Follow. Twitter returns you to your home page and you see the latest messages from your selected users in your friend timeline.

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Twitter Tips--Finding someone on another network

Finding someone on another network

Searching for the members of your posse individually using the Find on Twitter feature is an easy way to get going, but it can be time-consuming and frustrating if you keep coming up empty. An often better way to go is to get Twitter to do some of the legwork for you. 

Specifically, you can tell Twitter to rummage through your list of contacts on your Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, or MSN account. If Twitter finds one or more tweeters, it displays them in a list.

Follow these steps to give this a whirl:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Find People. The Find People page appears.

3.  Click the Find on other networks tab.

 4.  Click the network you want to scour: Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or MSN.

 5.  Type the e-mail address and password for that account.

6.  Click Continue. Twitter connects to your account, downloads your contacts list, and then checks for matches in the Twitter database. If it finds any, it displays them in a list and selects the check box beside each person by default.

7.  If there are any people you don’t want to follow, deselect the check box beside each of those people.

 8.  Click Follow. Twitter displays the Why not invite some friends? page, which lists all your contacts who don’t have a Twitter account. You can use this list to extend invitations to one or more contacts to join Twitter.

9.  Select the check box beside each person you want to invite.

 10.  Click Invite. Twitter fires off an e-mail message to each person.

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Twitter Tips--Finding people with Twitter accounts

Finding people with Twitter accounts

The best way to get started is to use the Find on Twitter feature, which enables you to scour the database of tweeters for someone you know. You can search by first name, last name, or even the person’s Twitter username. 

Here’s how it works:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Find People. The Find People page appears.

 3.  Click the Find on Twitter tab.

 4.  Use the text box to type the name (first or last or both) of the person you’re looking for.Using both first and last names is usually the way to go here.If that doesn’t work, use just the last name or the first name, whichever is more unique. If all you have is a partial username, you can enter that instead.

 5.  In the search results, click the person’s avatar or username to check out their profile.

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Twitter Tips--Getting an e-mail receive a direct message in Twitter

Getting an e-mail receive a direct message in Twitter-If someone you’re following replies to one of your updates, then you see that reply in your friend timeline, but for all other replies you must open the @Replies section of your home page. However, direct messages never appear in your time lines, so you must sign in to Twitter to see them.

That’s a hassle, but luckily it’s possible to configure your Twitter account to forward direct messages to your e-mail address. This option is turned on by default in new Twitter accounts, but it’s worth following these steps to make sure:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Settings.

 3.  Click the Notices tab.

 4.  Select the Email when I receive a new direct message check box.

 5.  Click Save. Twitter updates your account with the new setting.

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Twitter Tips--Making private updates in twitter

Making private updates in twitter. A default Twitter account is pretty much an open book:

A--Anyone (even people without a Twitter account) can access your home page and view your tweets.

 B--Each time you post a tweet it appears briefly on Twitter’s public timeline for all the world to see.

C--Anyone with a Twitter account can follow your updates.

Most Tweeters are fine with this, but you might prefer a less open approach. If so, you can configure your Twitter account to protect your updates. This means your account is much more private:

  A--Only people who follow you can access your home page and view your tweets.

  B--Your tweets never appear on Twitter’s public timeline.

 C-- People who want to follow you must send a request, and you can then either approve or decline that request.

If you like the sound of all that, here are the steps to follow to protect your updates:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Settings. The Settings page appears.

 3.  Click the Account tab.

 4.  Select the Protect my updates check box.

 5.  Click Save. Twitter updates your profile to protect your updates.

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Twitter Tips--Working with Updates Deleting,Adding

Once you’ve begun posting updates in earnest, you may find that you need to perform a little maintenance work from time to time. Twitter does not offer many options in this department, but there are three things you can do: delete an update, mark an update as a favorite, and make your updates private. The next three sections take you through the details.

Deleting an update in Twitter

One of the unusual and occasionally frustrating quirks of Twitter is that your tweets aren’t editable.Once you click the Update button, your post gets shipped out to all your friends and what they see is what you sent.

If you misspelled a word, made some egregious grammatical gaffe, or forgot to include an address or some other crucial bit of data, too bad; the flawed tweet remains in the Twitter sphere for all to see.

When they make a major mistake in an update, most Tweeters simply send a fresh copy of the tweet with the corrections made (and,if possible,a brief note about what was corrected).

Still,that error-filled tweet remains in the timeline. What to do? The one thing that Twitter does allow you to do is delete a tweet. This removes the tweet not only from your profile page (which lists all your tweets), but also from the timelines of everyone who follows you.

Here are the steps to follow to delete an update:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Profile. Twitter displays a list of yourrecent      tweets.

 3.  If you don’t see the tweet you want to remove, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click    Older. Repeat this until you find the update.

 4.  Move the mouse pointer over the tweet text. As you can  see in figure 3.3, the Delete this update icon

     (a garbage can) appears to the right of the tweet.

5.  Click the Delete this update icon. Twitter asks you to  confirm the deletion.

 6.  Click OK. Twitter removes the tweet from your profile page, as well as from the home pages of all of your followers.

Adding an update to your favorites in Twitter

Twitter saves copies of all your updates on your profile page. The most recent 20 tweets appear on the main profile page (log in to your account and click Profile). To see earlier tweets, click the Older link at the bottom of the page, and then you keep clicking Older to go farther back in your update 

history.

This is fine if you only check out your previous tweets from time to time. However, you might occasionally post an update that contains something really useful that you want to access 

frequently, such as a Web site or a quotation. In that case, it can be a real pain to always have to dig back through your tweets to find the update you’re looking for. 

To work around this problem,Twitter lets you save that tweet as a favorite, and you can access it quickly by clicking the Favorites link that appears on both your home page and your profile page.

Here are the steps required to save one of your tweets as a favorite:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Profile. Twitter displays a list of your recent tweets.

 3.  If you don’t see the tweet you want to save as a favorite, scroll down to the bottom 

of the page and click Older. Repeat this until you find the update.

 4.  Move the mouse pointer over the tweet text. As you can see in figure 3.4, the Favorite this update icon (a star) appears to the right of the tweet.

 5.  Click the Favorite this update icon. Twitter adds a copy of the tweet to your Favorites list.

Twitter also changes the Favorite this update icon to an orange Un-favorite this update icon. As you’ve no doubt guessed, you click this icon when you no longer want to store a tweet in your Favorites list.

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Twitter tips--Typing non-standard characters in Twitter

Typing non-standard characters in Twitter Besides the keys that you can eyeball on your keyboard, you can also include in your tweets a few non-standard characters, such as and ™. 

Twitter supports a character set called UTF-8,which is a list of 400 symbols, from the usual alphanumeric suspects to currency symbols, math operators, foreign characters, and more. presents a few useful characters and their corresponding codes.

Characters You Can Use In Your Twitter Posts

Character Code Character Code

€       Alt+0128                                    ®        Alt+0174

…     Alt+0133                                      ±       Alt+0177

•       Alt+0149                                       ²       Alt+0178

™     Alt+0153                                       ³       Alt+0179

¡       Alt+0161                                       1/4    Alt+0188

¢      Alt+0162                                      1/2     Alt+0189

£      Alt+0163                                       3/4    Alt+0190

¥      Alt+0165                                       ×       Alt+0215

©    Alt+0169                                        ÷        Alt+0247

To type one of these characters, hold down Alt and type the four-digit code using your keyboard’s 

numeric keypad.Alternatively, use the Character Map application in Windows:

 1.  Choose Start ? All Programs ? Accessories ? System Tools ? Character Map. The Character Map window appears.

 2.  Double-click the symbol you want to use. Character Map adds the symbol to the Characters to copy text box.

 3.  Click Copy. Character Map copies the character to the Clipboard.

4.  Switch to your Web browser and position the cursor within the Twitter text box at the position you want the character to appear.

 5.  Press Ctrl+V. Windows pastes the character into the text box.

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Twitter Tips- for managing the 140-character limit

Twitter Tips for managing the 140-character limit If there’s one thing that even many non-tweeters know about Twitter it’s that its messages can be no more than 140 characters long. Why 140 and not, say, 200, or 500, or no limit at all? Twitter was designed originally to use the Short Message Service (SMS) to send out its updates, and on the majority of SMS systems at the time, each message was limited to 160 characters. Twitter’s messages had to tack on the username at the front (which can be up to 15 characters long), so it 

chose 140 characters as the limit for a Twitter update.

Of course, knowing why you’ve only got 140 characters to express your thoughts is one thing, but actually shoehorning that thought into such a tiny space is quite another. Fortunately, with a bit of practice you’ll find yourself getting remarkably adept at crafting 140-words-or-less gems. To help you get there, here are a few pointers to bear in mind when composing your updates:

  Take advantage of the symbol short forms that are built in to the language. Use & or + instead of “and,” $ instead of “dollars,” % instead of “percent” or “percentage,” and so on.Use common abbreviations. E-mail, chat, instant messaging, and other forms of Internet communication have created a wide variety of abbreviations and acronyms, many of which are in common use: BTW (by the way), FYI (for your information), LOL 

(laughing out loud), and TTYL (talk to you later). Don’t hesitate to use these and other familiar short forms to save characters.

  Find shorter words. If there’s a key to winning the battle with the 140-character limit, it’s this: if a word has a shorter synonym, use the synonym. Delete “perturbed” and replace it with “mad”; get rid of “therefore” and use “so,” instead; replace “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” with “cool.”

 Avoid redundancy and wordiness. If you’re bumping up against the 140-character ceiling, cast a critical eye over your text and ruthlessly rewrite passages that are redundant or that use more words than necessary. For example, use the Delete key to change “in the vicinity of” to “near” and trash “at this point in time” in favor of “now.”

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Twitter tips--Sending an Update in twitter

Sending an Update in twitter There are a few folks with Twitter accounts who are “read-only” users: they follow others, but they don’t post any updates themselves. That’s fine, I guess, if you’ve simply got nothing to say, but few of us are that tongue-tied. I assume you signed up with Twitter because you’ve got some things to 

share, so the next few sections take you through a few ways that you can do just that.

Before you get to that, you may be wondering exactly what you should be posting. Are there any rules, official or unofficial, for the type of content that you can send? Fortunately, the answer to that question is a resounding “No!” If what you have to say isn’t illegal, then go ahead and say it. Of course, you only have 140 characters to work with, so Twitter is no place for the long-winded. 

The sheer compactness of a typical Twitter missive means that although the content is as varied as the 

people who send it, tweets do tend to fall into a few basic categories.

Sending an update using the Twitter site

There are multiple ways you can post updates to Twitter, and you learn about most of them elsewhere in the book. However, the most common posting method is still the Twitter site itself, so run through the steps:

1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Home.

 3.  Use the large What are you doing? text box to type your 

update. As you type, the number above the right edge of the text box counts down from 140 to tell you how 

many characters you have left. There are three things to note about this countdown:

l  When the count dips below 20, the number color changes to Maroon.

1 When the count dips below 10, the number color changes to Red.

1   When the count dips below 0, the number color stays Red, but it also sprouts a negative sign, and Twitter disables the Update button, You need to get the count back to 0 or more before Twitter allows you to post.

4.  Click Update. Twitter posts the update and adds it to the feed of every person who’s following you.

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Twitter tips--Stopping Twitter from Sending New Follower Messages

Stopping Twitter from Sending New Follower Messages With all these great renovations you’ve been doing, it won’t be long before people start beating a path to your Twitter door. You’ll know right away if your custom design is a hit because Twitter sends you an e-mail message every time a kind soul decides to follow you. Personally.

 I love getting these messages because it’s great to know that my tweets have a growing audience, and it also gives me a chance to check out lots of other profiles. You never know who you might come across 

and decide to follow yourself.

On the other hand, if your profile becomes quite popular, getting tons of messages from Twitter may not appeal to you. Similarly, you might be following as many people as you can handle, so you’re not interested in also following any of your new followers.

If that’s the case, then you should follow these steps to tell Twitter to stop sending you an e-mail message each time someone follows you:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Settings. The Settings page appears.

 3.  Click the Notices tab.

 4.  Deselect the Email when someone starts following me check box.

 5.  Click Save. Twitter updates your profile with the new setting.

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Twitter tips--Selecting a custom background image in Twitter

Twitter tips--Selecting a custom background image in Twitter

If you want to ramp up the “wow” factor, if you want to use your Twitter profile as part of a personal 

or business branding strategy, or if you just want a Twitter home that truly reflects your style and 

personality, then you need to augment your design with a custom background image.

You might think this is just a simple matter of uploading your favorite photo, but Twitter offers several unique challenges when it comes to selecting a background image. Before I get to those, run through the steps you need to follow to apply a custom background image to your Twitter profile:

 1.  Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2.  Click Settings. The Settings page appears.

 3.  Click the Design tab.

 4.  Click Change background image.

 5.  Click Browse. If you’re using Safari, click Choose File, instead. A file selection dialog box appears.

 6.  Choose the file you want to use, and then click Open (or Choose in Safari). You can use either a JPEG or a PNG file, and the maximum size is 800KB.

 7.  If you want Twitter to tile the image to cover the background, select the Tile background check box.

 8.  Click Save Changes. Twitter updates your profile with the new background image.

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