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Twitter - the special use of @ # and http: in tweets

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-02-09 12:21:52 - Graham Ellis

Great talk by John Dickens of @godjira at #Melksham Chamber last night. He runs Twitter for Business courses - http://bit.ly/gcWzm4

I've been tweeting for a while - Twitter is described as a microblogging service which basically means that you can put messages, up to 140 characters, onto the service for people to read, and you can read the messages of anyone you choose to follow, and / or any messages you find by clicking through tweets, or by searching. John's whistle-stop tour of Twitter, Linked-in and Facebook opened a new world for some of the audience, and although I've been using all three services (somewhat) for a while, I picked up a few golden nuggets.

As with texting, tweets have their own shorthands and special characters which help you cram a lot of content into your 140 (max) characters; the first sentence on this article (starting "Great talk ...") is just under 140 characters, and it contains the three really important 'specials':

Starting with an @ symbol, you have a reply or a mention. It's how you refer to other Twitter users - by their account names - and your reader can click on the link to be taken to their data feed.

Starting with a # symbol, you have a "hashtag". This is a search term that's usually in common use, and by selecting the link off that text you can filter out for display all other recent tweets, by any user, which are similarly marked.

Starting http:, you have a link. It takes you to an external page. And on Twitter, where every character counts, you want your URLs to be short - so you'll see things like http://bit.ly/gcWzm4 which are not in Libya (even though they look like it!) but take you to a site which redirects you to a longer and more human-readable address.

Here are three tweets where you can see examples of these in use:










If you want to learn more about Twitter - ask John. If you want to get involved with your own automated feeds from blogs, etc, through PHP - which is what we do - I might be able to persuade you to look at our PHP course. And if you want to know more about the @ # and http above, have a look at Twitter's help pages replies an mentions, hash symbols and short URLs.