Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [23]
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.