Twitter Part Deux
After playing a little more with Twitter, I’ve set up a contact in my
phone which has notes describing the various short codes that I think
it has available. Here they are - not case sensitive, of course, and
with all going to twitter’s number (40404):
- Requesting messages
- GET — get updates from all your friends
- GET USER — get USER’s last update
- Turning messages on and off
- ON / OFF — turn SMS updates on / off (also WAKE/SLEEP and START/STOP)
- LEAVE USER — turn off updates from USER
- LEAVE ALL — stop getting updates from all your friends
- FOLLOW USER — turn on updates from USER
- FOLLOW ALL — start getting updates from all your friends
- Messages to friends
- NUDGE USER — encourage USER to post something
- D USER MSG — send MSG to USER as a direct message
- @USER: MSG — send MSG as a reply to the last update from USER
- System sorts of things
- WHOIS USER — get information about USER
- INVITE NUMBER NAME MSG — send an invitation to NAME at NUMBER to join twitter with an optional MSG.
- STATS — get statistics about your account
- HELP — get a short help message (not terribly helpful)
- TIPS — get a short, helpful message
- FOLLOWERS — see who’s getting updates from you
I’ve also made a couple other observations about twitter. Even if
you don’t have unlimited SMS, it could be useful and fun. Just set up
some friends and turn off following them. You won’t get flooded with
updates, you can request them if you want (with GET), and you can use
the web interface to see your friends’ updates any time.
Also, it doesn’t seem super compelling to ever send a
twitter direct message, but I think it could be useful if you wanted
to send someone a message who might currently be asleep or something.
If their twitter preferences say “don’t message me between midnight
and 6AM”, the message isn’t delivered immediately. In spite of my
attempt to send
uninteresting message in what I thought would be off hours for a
bunch of my friends, I didn’t confirm whether it wasn’t delivered to
them later at all (and was only available on the web) or whether it
was delivered the next morning when their updates were turned on. So
direct messages may never make sense…
Finally, keeping your
may not be a super good idea. I haven’t decided whether this is
really that bad, but for now people seem to be able to start following
you without your consent. I think the practical impact would just be
that your messages start showing up on their pages (or they get a ton
of SMS updates about you which you’d already consented to make public
by not keeping your profile private anyway). If friendship were
necessarily reciprocal and felch had been able to push messages to my
personal page, that would obviously be bad/spam bait, but it’s not, so
maybe this is OK…