Week 3 of Twitter

Okay so I think this is the end of my third week as a Twitter User so here are some things I’ve learned since my first post about Twitter (”…offering an incomplete tweet cheat sheet“)

Twitterless

I talked about Twitterless in my post “…fretting less with Twitterless”, where I said that I was off to sign up for Twitterless right away.

Well, I never got to sign up for Twitterless - their website said to follow tless on Twitter to sign up, so I did but nothing happened. I also direct messaged tless but never received a response. I tweeted about it but not one responded. I think the developer’s website mentioned that he was busy with another application or something. Oh well… I signed up for Tweetdeck instead and so far I’m undecided about whether it’s working for me.

I feel like I have split personalities on Twitter - I’m connected to bloggers, crafters, musicians, grapic designers, writers, and parents due to the nature of my blog and my varied interests. I was hoping to find an application that would let me stream the different groups and also just send group-specific tweets. If anyone out there knows of an application out there that does that, I would love to know about it.

Magpie

Okay so I have to say that Magpie makes me feel funny. This is an advertising thing that you can sign up with and they use your twitter account to send out tweets advertising things under your profile. I don’t know if there is any way to tell if somone is using Magpie or not. Is there? I don’t have a problem with ads as long as you can tell they are ads. Also I like to think that people have control over what they are endorsing. I haven’t read much about Magpie yet so not sure if perhaps I am making some inaccurate assumptions about them. You can look for yourself if you are interested, they are at be-a-magpie.com. I have seen other Twitterers say that they will not follow anyone using Magpie so I’m guessing there is a way to recognize these people?

Follow/Unfollow Protocol

In my last post about Twitter, I had this to say about tweet deletes:

• I found following 44 people overwhelming - well now I’m following over 100 people and I think you just start getting used to it. I found that I don’t usually reply to tweets that are several hours old so I don’t always read them all. It’s like you have one hundred voices in your head and you just sort of get better at tuning them out when it’s necessary.
  
• I also read an interesting post on another blog that I can’t find now but it was basically saying ’stop whining about the @replies you don’t understand’. His instructions were to filter out the @replies (you can do this in the settings for Twitter) or just skip over them and get over it. This makes sense to me because I also read somewhere that not everyone wants to be Direct Messaged. Now I regret deleting those tweeters who were using all of those @replies… oops. I still think it makes sense to try to keep your @replies coherent so that others can join the conversation, or at least follow it - but given the character restrictions for tweets sometimes it’s just not possible.
  

Be Sweet: Greet and Re-Tweet

In my other post, I said that “I always thank them for the follow” but now that’s not necessarily true. It seems weird to send out a bunch of ‘thanks for the follows’ in a row as @replies. If you direct message a follower but you’re not following them back, they can’t reply to your DM and it just calls attention to the fact that you are not following them, which seems kind of awkward to me. If a new follower has thousands of followers I somehow don’t feel like I have to thank them, but that’s probably not correct etiquette. If I’m following them back I direct message a thank you if they seem like they are new to Twitter just to make them feel loved. Otherwise, I spend some time at their profile and links and then I try to send out a tweet that relates to them, sometimes with a thanks for the follow included. I figure the best ‘thanks for following me’ is a RT or a link to their writing, crafts, music - whatever it is.

I want to make clear though that I only do this if I truly endorse whatever it is - I’ve seen some other people just offer to retweet anything and that doesn’t work for me. Lots of people are following me because I followed them first, so it’s easy to find something to tweet (I obviously liked their stuff enough to follow them in the first place!)

Well that’s an update on Twitter - thanks for reading if you got this far and please leave your comments below. Don’t be shy, I’m ready for some feedback -