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Twitter / Introduction

Twitter is an open platform that allows sending short messages from a Twitter account. Important concepts are describe below.

Accounts

  • Each account is tied to a unique email address.
  • Account identifiers are usual a short string such as flast (first initial, last name), FirstLast, orgabbrev (organization abbreviation), or other variations.
  • Accounts are indicated by @account in tweets. The tweets are received by accounts that "follow" the account or because of settings on the Twitter account that send a digest to the user on daily, weekly, or other timeframe.
  • The use of social media and Twitter benefits from thoughtful use of accounts, hashtags, format, and attachments.

Tweets

  • Tweets are only consumed by Twitter users that follow the sender's account.
  • Tweets are are up to 280 characters that are sent from the account to the public twitter world.
    • A tweet can also contain attachments such as images.
    • A tweet can contain URLs to point to other content.
  • Tweets can contain "hashtags" of format #topic and multiple hashtags can be embedded in a tweet.
    • Hashtags are used to group, search, and filter tweets.
    • Whereas accounts can be controlled by the account owner, hashtags can be used by anyone.

Direct Messages

  • Direct messages can be sent directly to other Twitter accounts.