This post is for the people who have joined twitter recently, and they are really finding it difficult to understand the common terms which are used on twitter. If you are regular tweeter (twitter user) then you will already be familiar with these words, but wait you can still enjoy reading these.
Twitter was started as a site where people were able to post their actions / feelings / opinions in plain text, which was having a restriction of 140 characters. This 140 character restriction is still there.
Every single post which you put on twitter is called tweet. your tweet can be read by all your followers and rest of the word. So when will you tweet, it will be visible to the whole universe, but then universe is so big; and not all people will know that you have jus tweeted . If someone really want to receive your tweet explicitly he will simply follow you. Once some one will follow you he will be able to see your tweet in his timeline. Additionally if some will visit you twitter page he can see your tweets, without following you.
Now your followers have simple way to read your tweet. They can read via web interface, or via SMS, or via any twitter client. A twitter client is easy way to access & post tweets. You can also use your mobile to post the tweet. Mobile is very nice way to tweet because you carry that all the time.
People who are there on twitter are referred as tweeple. Some people even say tweeps. If you find someone on twitter who is really sweet, you can also call him sweeple.
Now this is the nice time for you to post a tweet, saying that i am reading this blog and put the link of this blog on twitter. Since you have a restriction of 140 character, you might not be able to post the link as well as your comment. So you can user URL shortening services like tinyurl.com; tinyurl.com was the early default URL shortener of the twitter, Now twitter is using bit.ly site for shortening the URL.
Now once you tweet about this article, and eventually if i will see your tweet i might tweet a reply, which will star with @ followed by your twitter username.
e.g @Yourname thanks for tweeting.
This tweet will also be received by all my followers, but since they will see that it is directed by the @ symbol they will understand that I am saying just to you. Not to the whole world. There is a unicast way to send a tweet just to you, which is called direct message, but most of the tweeple don't like that, because its after all a cool way to send you a @ reply rather than sending you a direct message, because you might not like it.
When twitter saw that people are using @ reply so often, they started hyper linking the @replies to your twitter page. This hyper linking will fail, if you mistype the person's username correctly.
When you find someone's tweet, and if you like it a lot, you can choose to retweet it.
e.g. RT @markandey: The 12 People You Dont Want to Meet on Facebook http://bit.ly/yUJPt
Retweeting is nice way to spread a news from my followers to your followers.
When you are tweeting something very specific you can put a special keyword in your message. Which is called hashtag.
e.g. I am enjoying lecture by person blah blah #sxsw
or e.g. Manchester united is playing great #FIFA
or e.g. Alonso is driving bad #F1
When twitter grew little more people started feeling superior if they had more number of followers. So people found a new way to introduce new tweeple to their followers. with a hashtag #followfriday. They usually post the recommendation on Fridays.
Twitter has built a huge community, and now they call this word as twitosphere. When you are not able to focus on your work because you are tweeting you can say you are twittcrastinating. So start using twitter now. It will be so much of fun. Oh ya, you can meet many of tweeple from your city by going to tweetup.
You can say tweet-a-later when you are going to sleep OR off to do some important work.
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