Twitter, do you speak it?
What's the meaning of the strange punctuation you find on Twitter these days? DLB helps you speak like a native by deciphering some Twitter shorthand.
Because Twitter’s features were designed to be accessible via SMS codes, the service can be pretty unintuitive without a little study.
Twitter uses a special command syntax, both internal to the application as well as through other services using the API. If you encounter some text with a strange prefix applied, and it doesn’t read like typical TXT-speak, that’s probably what you’re looking at. Today we’ll cover a few that you’re likely to run across.
@Reply
The best known example of tweet syntax is @reply. If you start a tweet with @ followed by a username, the tweet is considered a reply. Replies appear in that user’s Home feed, and are filtered into their @Replies tab. You don’t have to be following someone for them to receive your @reply. This is an great way to track conversations within your feed.
The use of @+username anywhere but the start of a Tweet creates a reference to another user. It will link back to their Twitter account within your Tweet.
Hashtags
The next most common syntax code you might run into is the hashtag, designated by the pound sign, #. This is not part of the Twitter spec, but is widely used nonetheless.
Hashtags are a simple way to group tweets together. They work similar to tags on other services like Delicious or Flickr. Activating them is as simple as following @hashtags. Once you’ve done this, any time you want to create a grouping, simply add #+tagname to your tweet.
Twitter used to offer tag tracking, but as of this time, it is not a working feature. For now, the best sites to check out tag collections are Hashtags.org and Twemes.
What can you do with them?
Well, you might use hashtags to remember to pick up the milk (#todo), follow a news story (#Obama), or research a paper (#hegel).
Oftentimes, conference goers will use hashtags to collect tweets about events and get-togethers, i.e. #SIGGRAPH08.
Hashtags were famously used during natural disasters like the San Diego fires and Hurricane Ike to coordinate disaster information and relief efforts.
Plodt
Last is one that I have been seeing more of lately, especially around the debates—Plodt points. When I first saw these on @shiffman’s feed, I thought he was participating in some kind of life-driven RPG. In fact, I guess you could use it for that sort of thing…
Plodt is a service that allows you to enter data from your tweets and chart them in a graph. This is useful for both tagging and analysis. If you jog for 5 miles, you might record it as *fitness 5*. This creates a category for fitness tweets. Over time, you can use it to track the progress of your routine.
Plodt works like hashtags in that you must activate it by following @Plodt. This will send you a URL that gives you access to your graphs. Syntax is straightforward: *+tag+value+*. Incidentally, you can only rate something up to 10; decimals are okay, though.
Your mileage of Plodt may vary. I think there’s something to be gained from personal analytics (mycro is another interesting source), although I find Plodt updates somewhat annoying to read in my public feed. Can’t you just privately tweet yourself? (Wow, that sounds dirty.)
Until next time.
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