Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [27]
The timeline includes all Twitter users who haven’t opted to protect their updates: people you follow, people you don’t follow, and people who don’t follow you. You can use the timeline to broaden your network, finding new conversations and topics, and generally expanding your presence on Twitter.
If you can get to the Public Timeline through the preceding links, it shows the most recent tweets from everyone who uses Twitter, in real time (like the page shown in Figure 3-5). It looks a lot like your own Twitter stream on your Home screen, but with more content to discover.
After you get to the Everyone timeline, spend a little time either scrolling from page to page and tweet to tweet manually or skimming for interesting conversations. (Refresh your Web browser to see the latest tweets.) If you find an interesting person or conversation, just click that Twitter handle to find out more about that user. You can also send an @reply to the tweet, which lets you just jump into the conversation, even if you don’t yet follow any of the people in it. Or, if you like what you see, you can follow someone without replying to them — follow whoever looks interesting to you!
You can check in on the Public Timeline periodically, even after you start to grow your network into the triple digits and higher. Even people who have thousands in their personal Twitter network can find fresh ideas and interesting people on the Public Timeline once in a while, which keeps their Twitter experience the most varied and interesting it can be.
Figure 3-5: Looking at the Everyone timeline on Twitter.
Seeing Who You Follow
After you start using Twitter to its full potential, you may want to see a list of whom you follow. To see whom you follow:
1. Log in to Twitter.
On any page in Twitter, you find the sets of numbers in the upper-right sidebar labeled Following, Followers, and Updates.
2. Click Following.
A list of people you’re following appears (as shown in Figure 3-6). Currently, Twitter sorts your Following list chronologically by when you started following them, with the most recent at the top.
3. Scroll through the list manually, page by page.
This process works fine until you start to follow many more people. Without a way to sort or search — which Twitter still doesn’t have (hint, hint, Twitter!) — finding out if you follow someone specifically can become tedious after you start following more than 100 people.
Figure 3-6: Check out the twitterers whom you’re following.
If you have a particular user in mind and you’re not sure if you’re following him, go that person’s Twitter page. If you’re following him, under his avatar, you’ll see the “Following.” If you’re not following him, you’ll see a Follow button, which you can click to follow him.
After you break the 100-following mark, you probably want to find another method for figuring out whom you follow. You can figure out whom you follow in a few ways, using third-party applications built on Twitter’s API, which we cover in Chapter 9.
Figuring Out Who’s Following You
You may also want to see who’s following you on Twitter — maybe you want to find new people to follow, or you’re just curious who’s reading your tweets. You can pull up the list of your followers on any Twitter page. Find the sets of numbers in the upper-right sidebar labeled Following, Followers, and Updates, and click Followers.
Similar to the Following link (which we talk about in the preceding section), it brings up a list of people who are following you. Twitter sorts the list with the people who’ve started following you the most recently at the top.
Just like the Following list, you have to click through the Followers list page by page. Chapter 9 suggests some tools, such as TwitterKarma (http://dossy.org/twitter/karma) and FriendorFollow (http://friendorfollow.com), that can show you both who you’re following and who’s following you, which is considerably easier than scrolling through your followers page by page.
If you don’t want