Twitter DM Longer than 140 characters

Twitter DM Longer than 140 characters

 

The following is a list of tips, tricks and tidbits of information that can be useful to any user. I think Twitter should have a central resource explaining at least some of these, because not being aware of some can definitely affect user experience (i.e. #8)

 

  1. Changing user names: I’ve known several users who wanted to change their user names so that no one could find them. Well, unfortunately, Twitter makes it quite easy to track a user even if they do change their user name.

     

    1. If you’ve ever corresponded with the user, by clicking on the “in reply to” you’ll get to the actual message regardless of the user’s new name.

    2. If you’ve ever listed the user – and this could be a private (invisible) list as well – the user would still appear in the list regardless of his new name.

     

  2. Changing user names #2: the only true way to “start a new life” on Twitter is by opening a new account. Though if the person still “hangs out” with the same crowd he did before, he will be found… there’s no Twitter witness protection program ;-).

     

  3. Getting out of lists: if someone places a user in a list and he does not wish to be listed, all he needs to do is block the listing user and he’ll be removed from all public/private lists.
    (note that as I mentioned in #1, this is one partial way to escape detection when changing a user name).

     
    A while ago one of the eccentric users who took it on themselves to police user activities told me that “I’m being watched from now on” (95% of his tweets to other users were “You’re being watched”. Immediately after he sent it to me, he also sent this to Arnold Schwarzenegger – I said he was eccentric, right?). I chuckled to myself and blocked him. Good luck with that, buddy – let’s see you track all of those without using private lists.

     

  4. DM mechanism: Unlike what Twitter states, the DM mechanism is not limited to 140 characters. Whether it’s a bug or a feature, I don’t know. As far as I heard, using an external application can enable you to send much longer DMs, though most applications – and the web interface – limit you to 140 characters. This is easily demonstrated by a screenshot of a DM I received some time ago (which appears at the top of this post).

     

  5. Finding out whether you’ve been blocked: How do you find out whether a user has blocked you without trying to follow them again? Easily: you go to their profile page and see whether you can list them. If you can’t, you’ve been blocked. In addition, you can actually do this en-masse by going to a list, or a user’s followers list, and see whether there are any users you cannot list. All these have blocked you.

     

  6. Public messages: I’m sure you know that you only see responses to a user if you follow both sides: so if user @a talks to user @b, you’ll see their individual responses if you follow both users a and b. However, one way to make a response public is by adding a dot . before the response, i.e. .@a message. Of course, when you think about it, this really changes the response to a standard tweet, which is of course public, yet this still is a commonly used mechanism for making responses public and usually the dot is used as well.

     

  7. Number of stored tweets: many users are not aware of this, but the profile page only shows the last 3,000 tweets. If a user wants to be able to view all his tweets, he should use a service like Backupmy which is free and stores all the tweets that have been sent.

    Interestingly, it seems Twitter does in fact store all tweets. This is evident by clicking on ‘in response to’ of really old tweets as well as by the favorites section – which often include tweets that have long vanished from one’s profile. I find this a weird design choice on Twitter’s end.

     

  8. Vanishing DMs: I’m not sure whether this was always the case or was only changed a few months ago: DMs vanish if one of the participants in the correspondence deletes them. This is a very bad design choice, since it is possible to delete a DM before its recipient has seen it! Also, if Twitter has made this choice, why not be consistent and do the same for responses?

     

  9. Vanishing DMs #2: On the other hand, if a user terminates his account, his DMs are still available.

     

  10. Number of followers/followees/lists bug: this is a serious bug that has been present for at least several months, and I’m sure almost every user has encountered it. Specifically, the number of followers and/or followees and/or lists one appears in fluctuates: A refresh of the screen changes it, and another refresh may change it back. Usually the difference is by no more than 15, but I’ve seen one user whose follower numbers fluctuated by a 100 (exactly!). Weird bug, and I don’t understand why it is still present after so long since it clearly affects user experience.

     
    I’m sure there are many more of the above I omitted – if you have some suggestions, please let me know!