Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [44]
Like any other social-media company, Twitter has a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement that all members must adhere to or risk having their accounts suspended or deleted. You can access Twitter’s terms at http://twitter.com/terms. You won’t find anything particularly surprising in them: You must be at least 13 years old to create an account and use the service, you can’t engage in abuse or harassment, you can’t spam other members or participate in activities that break any laws, and so on. The terms are actually more liberal than most Web services’ regulations; pornography and explicit language, for example, aren’t banned.
Beyond the terms of service, Twitter etiquette is simple: Be genuine and nondeceptive and provide value. Other than that, just use Twitter how it suits you. This is primarily an unofficial protocol, but do keep in mind that Twitter keeps tabs on “deceptive” activity, too: Twitter can ban accounts that impersonate celebrities or companies if those accounts don’t make it clear that they’re unofficial or parodies. This policy is a contentious point in the Twitter community: Many members were upset when the @cwalken account, belonging to an aspiring comedian pretending to be actor Christopher Walken, was deleted from the system.
Beyond the simple regulations, you can’t really use Twitter in a right or wrong way because no two people use it for exactly the same reasons. But some members certainly have their opinions:
Some users complain when others tweet too often, whereas others complain that their contacts don’t tweet enough. (This complaint is a little silly. Don’t like the contents? Turn the dial. Unsubscribe.)
Some users take issue with strings of @replies and wonder why those conversations weren’t conducted in a private forum.
You may encounter confusing, even conflicting, advice and back-seat tweeting from the handful of people on Twitter who aren’t comfortable without rules. Don’t take them too seriously; Twitter just isn’t that rigid.
Be polite on Twitter, for the most part, but no more or less so than you’re expected to be in the real world — just keep in mind that Twitter is a public forum. Twitter posts and feeds get exported outside of Twitter and onto Twitter-based Web sites, blogs, social-media sites such as Facebook, and aggregators such as FriendFeed. If you know you plan to, say, sync up your Twitter account with your Facebook account so that your tweets appear as your Facebook status message, keep in mind that you’re branching out beyond the Twitter community and culture.
Although users love Twitter’s largely rule-free nature, some generally accepted behaviors have evolved over time. You can ease your transition into the culture of Twitter by getting familiar with these behaviors before you first start out. Establish dedication and credibility early on, in part, by knowing your way around the following Twitter customs.
Language and abbreviations
Over time, any group of people that interacts regularly falls into its own “vernacular” way of talking. Twitter is no exception to that rule; in fact, it may be even more subject to it because of the 140-character limit. Twitter’s lexicon has evolved over time to include unique words, phrases, and abbreviations that most regular users understand and recognize. But new users often find these references confusing.
Right off the bat, you see a lot of puns involving the word “Twitter,” with the prefixes tw- or twi- added to the front: tweet, tweeple, tweetup, and so on. At first, it looks like baby talk — and indeed, it can get a bit over-the-top. Not all members