Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [47]
Profile page: You can use the old-school way of seeing your Twitter history by going to your Twitter Profile page and clicking the More button over and over again until you see the tweet you’re looking for. This approach definitely takes some time, though. (And if you really just want the one tweet, searching (http://search.twitter.com) might be a lot easier!)
Aggregator: If you’re a new Twitter user, you can have an aggregator, such as FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com) or SocialThing (http://socialthing.com), save your history. Aggregators simply combine your Twitter feed together with any feeds you might have on other social sites. Do you share photos on Flickr? Then there is a feed of your pictures. Videos on YouTube? Same thing. It’s kind of like double posting, for insurance purposes.
You can also keep track of some tweets by marking them as favorites with the little star icon on the web interface. A drawback to favoriting tweets is that you can’t search within them on Twitter, and Twitter’s team hasn’t said anything about creating a means to do this search.
Instead of using the Twitter Favorites feature, bookmark your favorites by using a tool such as Delicious (http://delicious.com), Shareaholic (www.shareaholic.com), or FriendFeed. You may find using an outside tool a little more inconvenient than the Favorites feature at first, but you can find the tweets that you mark in more than one way later. Some people even do Favorite Tweets Roundup posts on their blogs every few days, which you can do much more easily by using a bookmarking service, such as Delicious.
Your Feeds, My Feeds, Everyone’s Feeds
We talk more about RSS feeds and what you can do with them in Chapter 8, but we want to introduce a couple of different feeds that you can access and subscribe to right from Twitter.com.
First, every Twitter account has an RSS feed associated with it. To access the RSS feed:
1. Navigate to a user’s Twitter page.
Our account, @dummies, is at http://twitter.com/dummies.
2. Click the RSS Feed of @dummies’s Updates link.
You can find this link near the end of the content on the right sidebar.
Depending on what RSS reader you use, you see a page to subscribe to that feed.
3. If you’ve protected your updates, you need to log into the API (see Figure 7-1).
You gain access to that user’s feed.
Figure 7-1: Logging into the API to access the RSS feed of a protected user.
If you want to access one single RSS feed with the tweets of everyone that you follow:
1. Navigate to your Twitter Home screen.
Either click the Twitter logo in the upper-left corner or the Home link in the upper-right corner of any Twitter page, or if you’re already logged in, navigate to http://twitter.com/home.
2. Click the RSS Feed link.
You can find this link near the end of the content on the right sidebar. (Scroll down until you find it.) The RSS logo appears nearby.
Now, you can access an RSS feed of updates for everyone you follow.
In fact, every page that has some sort of update stream has an RSS update feed associated with it. Alternatively, if your browser supports it, you can click the RSS icon inside the address bar in your browser to access the feed for that page.
We go over the more interesting points of what you can do with Twitter feeds in Chapter 8, including porting them over to an RSS reader so that you can view a stream without having to visit Twitter.com.
Deciphering Twitter Shorthand Code
The more you use Twitter, the more you’re going to want to find quicker ways to do things. Conveniently, Twitter has included a number of shorthand codes that you can use to perform almost any action directly from the What Are You Doing? box. These codes are particularly useful when you’re working from a mobile phone by sending your tweets