Twitter characters: @, d, RT, #

(CC) Gaetan Lee,
www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/

This is Part 1 of a series on Twitter Practical How-to's.

Messages in Twitter (affectionately called "tweets") are straightforward: You have 140 characters, so just type something. But there are a few special characters that you will need to know, a sort of "Twitter alphabet soup." The Twitter characters with special meaning are: @, d, RT and #.

Quite honestly, when I first began using Twitter, I thought, "These special characters are some kind of code. They have geek appeal, but there is no way ordinary people will use them." I thought they would severely limit the potential Twitter audience. But I'm afraid I underestimated the willingness of ordinary folks to use special characters. Those learning Twitter are likely to be people who have done terse phone texting and used Internet acronyms like LOL. And after all, there are only four codes:

@: Talk publicly to another person

Messages starting with @ are called @replies because they are used to reply to someone else's tweet. Taking my user name "jonmreid" as an example, if you start a message with "@jonmreid", I will see it on the web interface within @jonmreid in the right column(right under "Home"), even if I don't follow your tweets.

The @username can also appear elsewhere in a message and it will be shown to that person. This is a fairly recent change Twitter made, and they changed the term from @replies to mentions, but most people still call them @replies. So if you want to call someone's attention to your message, include @ and their user name somewhere in your message.

Twitter also supports a mechanism to connect one message to another: To reply to a message in the web interface, click the "reply" arrow, . This starts off your message as an @reply to the other person, but more importantly, it keeps track of which message you are replying to. This connection between specific messages is often called "threading" and helps people see the context of the conversation.

Important: If you follow a person's tweets, their @replies to someone else no longer appear in your timeline unless you also follow the person being replied to. Mentions are still shown, but @replies are not, limiting your ability to pick up conversations around you. My TwiTip post Twitter WAS a Cocktail Party explains this in detail.

d: Talk privately to another person

Messages starting with "d" are called Direct Messages because they go directly to that person and to no one else. So if you start a message with "d jonmreid", I will see it on the web interface within Direct Messages in my inbox.

There's an important thing to remember about direct messages: You can only send them to someone who is following you. This is Twitter's way of protecting you from getting private spam. Unfortunately, it is easy to forget this, especially if you receive a direct message; the natural tendency is to reply by the same means. More unfortunate still, Twitter gives you no warning if you try to DM someone who is not following you!

Direct messages are obviously good if you want privacy. But another reason to send a direct message is when a public message would not be beneficial or interesting to others. For example, if we have some back-and-forth, you might conclude with a reply to me, "@jonmreid thanks." There is no useful information there for other people. I recommend either expanding your message to be meaningful, like "@jonmreid Thanks for the tips on Twitter characters" or taking it private, "d jonmreid thanks."

RT: Repeat another person's tweet

When a message begins with RT, that indicates that the person is passing on someone else's message because they thought it was worth repeating. "Repeating a tweet" is shortened to retweet and represented by RT, followed by the username of the person who wrote the original message.

When you see an RT, it's a clue that the message may be worth your attention, because somebody thought it was worth passing on. Conversely, when you read a message and think "wow" in some way, pass it on: retweet it.

I'll address the importance of retweets in another post later in the series.

#: Tag a message with a label

Messages can have arbitrary labels beginning with the # symbol. One of the many names of this symbol is "hash," so these labels are called hash tags. They provide a way to categorize messages, allowing you to search for messages with a particular tag. Remember, Twitter messages are public, so the search will cover all messages.

As I wrote in Why Twitter: Group participation on conference website, the presence of such tags (in particular the way they united all messages related to a particular conference) was one of the things that helped me realize that Twitter was more than individual blabbing, but provided the means for collective snapshots.

How do you find messages containing a particular tag? Use Twitter search.

How do you find the meaning of a tag? Use Tagalus, a dictionary for hash tags. Not everything is in there, though, so sometimes you just have to ask someone.

Twitter is user-driven

What I find fascinating about these special characters is that except for direct messages, the special characters and their functions were created by Twitter users! This is an important theme: Twitter's simplicity and openness allow it to be used in ways their creators did not imagine or specify. As a particular idea spreads and becomes used, then the Twitter team may consider how to add support for that functionality (such as ensuring delivery of @replies).

This means that things will change as new usage patterns emerge. Just today I saw tweets indicating that Twitter was experimenting with combining "replies" (@username at the beginning) with "mentions" (@username anywhere else). Some Twitter clients provide functionality not directly available in the web interface, such as the ability to click on a hash tag to perform a search.

So as you become familiar with "Twitter alphabet soup" of @, d, RT and #, remember that most of it was made up by users. Keep an eye open for uses of the 140 characters. And if you don't know what something is, just ask—you're bound to get some help. That's Twitter!

Do you have any tips for using the special Twitter characters? Share them in the comments!

If you liked this post, please subscribe to blog one another or follow me on Twitter. And if you have further questions about Twitter, I'd love to help you get started; feel free to email me, or leave a comment below.

Twitter Practical How-to's series:

1. Twitter characters: @, d, RT, #
2. Use a Twitter client
3. What to tweet (and what not to)
4. Who to follow on Twitter
5. I'm being followed on Twitter!
6. Dealing with Twitter spam
7. More to come…

Further reading:

• Why Twitter?
• Before You Sign Up for Twitter

Comments

[Tim Beauchamp]

A couple additional points. With the Hashtags, They shouldn't contain non alpha(a-z) characters. Maninly because the twitter clients don't see past other characters. So, #fun2.0 will get truncated as #fun2 some places but not others. They appear to be case insensitive, but third party twitter tools may not be a lax. convention is all lower case. And, keep whitespace on either side.

for @ and d These only work as expected when they are the first character of the tweet (as far as I can tell and the documentation seems to confirm this. You will see them appear in the middle of the tweet, this is usually just to serve as a reference to another twitter user, and does not forward.

[Jon Reid]

Thanks, Tim! Those are good clarifications.