Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [13]
Chapter 2
Hello, Twitter World!
In This Chapter
Getting your Twitter party started
Coming up with a good Twitter name
Mixing it up: Making friends and saying hi
Standing out with a unique Twitter profile
Getting SMS tweets on your cellphone (or not)
Twitter is a deceptively simple, yet powerful conversation tool that enables users to broadcast short messages to the world and to connect more closely with people they care about. Intrigued about why this “stupid”-looking tool is so well-loved and popular? Then this chapter is the place to get your feet wet. It usually takes a while of using Twitter to get what about it could be really interesting and valuable to your life. Luckily, Twitter is not only easy to use, but it’s also quick to set up and a piece of cake to get going.
In this chapter, we go over the very basics of Twitter: getting a username, beautifying your profile, finding people to communicate with, and getting yourself situated and ready to start tweeting like a pro in no time.
Signing Up
For many Web services, signing up is the easiest part of an otherwise complicated process. With Twitter, using the site is just as easy as signing up.
To sign up for a Twitter account, follow these steps:
1. Use your Web browser to navigate to the Twitter Web site at www.twitter.com.
The Twitter splash page appears, as shown in Figure 2-1.
2. Click the large green Get Started — Join! button.
The signup page appears, as shown in Figure 2-2.
Figure 2-1: The Twitter splash page.
Figure 2-2: The very short and simple Twitter signup page.
3. Enter your desired username and basic information in the appropriate text boxes.
The only information Twitter requires from you is a username, a password of your choice, and a unique e-mail address where Twitter can contact you for notifications. (You’ll probably take longer to decide on a username than to actually sign up. We cover how to choose a good Twitter name in the following section.)
4. Type the CAPTCHA code in the Type the Words Above text box.
This step is a standard Web tactic to prove that you’re a human and not a spam program. (For more information on this code, see the sidebar “What’s up with the CAPTCHA?”)
5. Click the Create My Account button.
By clicking the Create My Account button, you’re agreeing to Twitter’s Terms of Service. You see a link at the bottom of the page where you can read those Terms of Service if you like, or you can go to http://twitter.com/tos to read them.
You’re taken to your newly created Twitter account (see Figure 2-3).
Figure 2-3: A Twitter blank slate.
What’s up with the CAPTCHA?
A CAPTCHA is a quick check to make sure that an actual person, rather than a computer program, is using the Web site. Web applications use CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a standard defense against spam and automatically generated user accounts.
You may find the CAPTCHA a bit tricky to read, but that’s largely the point. Computers have a hard time reading text that’s distorted in any way, but humans can adjust rather quickly.
Sometimes, you may run into a hard-to-read or ambiguous CAPTCHA. If you’re having trouble reading the CAPTCHA, Twitter uses the popular reCAPTCHA tool, which can easily generate another CAPTCHA for you: Just click the Get Two New Words link to get another CAPTCHA. There is an audio version of the CAPTCHA on Twitter, but it really doesn’t seem to work well.
If you can’t read a CAPTCHA after a few tries, you may be a computer. If you think that you may, in fact, be non-human, please consult your doctor or trusted medical professional.
Did you know you can register for Twitter entirely by text from any cellphone? Get a friend started while you’re away from a computer — you can create a new Twitter account from any cellphone at any time. Just send an SMS text message with the word “join” to 40404 and follow the directions that are texted back to you to choose