Twitter ... Help please!!

[uk_gold]

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter, so I finally signed up ... but now I have no clue what to do next ... and I'm getting e-mails that people are watching my twitter ... people I've never even heard of

Comments

[thaumata]

There are a million spammers on Twitter now. Just ignore anyone that you don't know. If it creeps you out to have some weirdo following your public timeline, you can block them or protect your updates (friends-only.)

Usually, the way twitter works for an american is:
- You pair up your device with your account (Settings > Devices)
- You send an SMS to 40404
- It appears in your twitter page
- Your friend makes a tweet: You receive an SMS with their name and message
- Your friend sends you a Direct Message: You receive an SMS with their name and message

BUT BUT BUT

You are in the UK, and twitter SMS is limited here. They decided last summer it cost too much to let people send international SMS messages, so they turned that function off. So, as a UK person, you can:

- Pair your device with your account
- Send an SMS to Twitter's international number (+44 762 480 1423)
- This will make it appear in your page. (The number is on the Isle of Mann, so check to make sure it's not costing you a fortune to send a text there.)
- You will NOT receive SMS when your friends update their pages, even if they are in the UK
- You will NOT receive SMS when your friends directly message you

But this is all for SMS messages. If your phone can actually get on the internet somehow, you can download a Twitter application and use that to check the page for your messages. I think some of them even notify you as new ones are coming in, so long as you're connected to wifi or whatever. Graham uses his iPhone and twitter all the time and he really loves the app he's using... except he's being crabby at me right now and I'm not about to go ask him the name, haha. I will find out later for you, though.

Other good things to know:

* To respond to a particular person, you need to do an @ reply to make sure they see it. So, if you want to say something to me, you would type "@thaumata O HAI THAR" and then it would show up in my timeline.

* I think it can be really annoying to have to read @ replies my friends are sending to people I don't even know. There is a setting where you can ignore @s for anyone you're not friends with, or from everyone, if you don't care to listen to your friends chat with each other.

* http://search.twitter.com/ is a good place to see what's happening with certain keywords. There is a way you can subscribe to keywords from your mobile but I have never done it. (Like, you can choose to hear all updates regarding your company name, or something like that.) I don't know how or if it works from the UK, though.

* There are a bazillion desktop clients for twitter, too. I like one called Tweetdeck. It has a cool thing where it shows you current popular topics on twitter, which can be kind of cool for hearing news right away. http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

Ok, I'm shutting up now. <3

[uk_gold]

Wow, that's awesome, thank you!!

I'm just heading out for a few days, but I'll set it all up when I get back.

Thank you so much (and I LOL'd at yr comment about Graham being crabby, so you'll ask him later)!

:-D