Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [28]
Turn on e-mail notifications in the Settings area. Click the Notices tab, check the Email When Someone Starts Following Me check box, and click Save. The e-mail notification authorizes Twitter to send you an e-mail alerting you about each new follower. Then, you can just click a link in the e-mail to that user’s profile and see right away whether you want to follow them back.
Try to send a user who may be following you a direct message. If she is following you, you’re able to send that direct message. If that user isn’t following you, you get a User Does Not Follow You error message (as shown in Figure 3-7). Then you have to decide whether you want to try to get that user’s attention in another way. Be sure to check for the Action message on her actual Profile page when you do so, as the Direct Messages interface has been buggy in the past.
Figure 3-7: A notification of a direct message failure.
Looking at What You’ve Tweeted
You can see what you’ve tweeted in the past in a variety of ways. The first place to check is your own profile: Click the Profile link in the top-right corner navigation bar (or just click your avatar) to open your Profile page. Your Profile page, in addition to displaying your short bio and profile information, displays a feed of all your public tweets in chronological order. Just like the pages showing your followers and who you follow (which you can read about in the preceding sections), you can keep clicking the More button on the bottom of the page to see older posts.
Also, your profile is a publicly accessible URL. If your username is @dummies, navigate to http://twitter.com/dummies to jump directly to your Profile page.
If you’re looking for a specific tweet, you can first look for it by using Twitter’s search page (http://search.twitter.com). Do a search for your username — if it’s a common name, you might want to include the @ — plus a keyword from the tweet. The tweet you’re looking for is most likely in the search results. Figure 3-8 shows a Twitter Search results page.
Tracking trends
If you’re interested in searching for more than just what you’ve tweeted about yourself, you can see what the rest of the world is tweeting about on Twitter’s Search page and in the new Trending Topics part of the Home screen sidebar. Go to http://search.twitter.com, and below the Search button, you see a list of links to “trending topics.” If a new movie is coming out, or the World Series is on TV, or a major news event is happening somewhere in the world, you’re likely to see it as a trending topic. Sometimes the trending topics can introduce you to topics of conversation you didn’t even know about.
If you protect your updates, searching by using Twitter Search doesn’t work because the tweets aren’t indexed in the search engine. It’s a small price to pay for privacy.
You can also search for specific tweets by using Google or another search engine. In our experience, Google tends to update its index against Twitter.com very often and also offers advanced search terms so that you can really focus the search. Additionally, Google’s search interface makes it possible to see who else is talking about your tweets, in addition to the tweets themselves.
Google does such a good job of indexing Twitter that it remains (at this writing) the best way to find out whether someone is on Twitter or not. At Google.com, run a search for Firstname Lastname Twitter, and usually you can find out right away whether a person is a tweeter. Bear in mind that very famous people who appear to be tweeting may be fan pages or other hoaxes, though — unless @DarthVader actually does exist, in which case, be very afraid!
Your public tweets are indexed by search engines. You can delete your tweets on Twitter by clicking the Trash Can icon, but if you don’t do it within a few seconds, Google and other search engines, as well as Twitter’s own search tool, have already indexed those tweets. So, sometimes