Twittering my life away

Note: My Twitter Lexicon follows

If you read many tech blogs you must have read at least one by now that has mentioned something about Twitter. Positive reports generally make note that Twitter is hard to explain and that you either get it or you don’t. Those that criticize Twitter might just be categorized as those who simply don’t get it. I’m realistic and open enough to acknowledge that Twitter isn’t for everyone and the fact that even those who do like it can rarely agree on why speaks to its enigmatic appeal.

I like it.

How do I define it? I believe it was intended as method by which users could share whatever it is that they were doing with whoever chose to follow their exploits on their computer or cell phone. Tweets were intended to be nothing more than globally accessible status messages, but they have grown beyond that now and will continue to grow beyond what they are today as Twitter’s userbase continues to expand. New features are being added as the population grows and perhaps one day tweets will no longer be restricted to 140 characters of unformatted text. But I think there is a certain challenge to expressing yourself within the confines of this simple condition. I hope that particular limitation stays.

Like most online social experiments, a vocabulary and a sort of etiquette has emerged and developed. Twitter is still young enough that these terms and protocols of politeness haven’t completely gelled yet, but you can see the unwritten rules forming in the moral dilemmas users are faced with and how they voice them over the service itself.

There is also a pecking order developing. For the most part, people who are “internet famous” elsewhere bring their popularity with them to Twitter. Many are the A-List bloggers and podcasters with hordes of followers, few but revered are those who actually reciprocate Twitter friendship and engage in conversation with their myriad followers. Follow the right collection of twitters and you will witness them holding court at various times.

Services such as Twitterholic will help you quickly determine who the Twitterati are, whether or not they follow as much as they are followed (see Reciprocal Following) and how much they actually post (see Twitter Lurker). Twittervision marries Google Maps with Twitter showing you a sampling of the public list while also pinpointing the location of the twitters themselves.

Twitter has quickly become one of those topics that every blogger seems to have to talk about at some point. Like spam, “why I haven’t posted in so long”, our pets and blogging itself, it has rapidly graduated to the status of “ubiquitous blog topic.” Well, count me among the rest of them who have blogged on this mysterious social experiment.

I’m not a member of the Twitterati, I don’t reciprocally follow you if you follow me and I wouldn’t suggest you start D’ing me without getting to know me first, but I hope my posts are rarely self-absorbed and I’ll try to keep the "Look at me" tweets to a minimum.

Here are a few Twitter terms I have picked up in the last months of using Twitter. Thank you and happy tweeting.

Twitter Lexicon

@
A reply sent to the public list in regards to a single twitters tweet using the "at" symbol followed by the username of the twitter to whom one is replying followed by the reply. A series of @s between twitters constitutes a Twitter Chat.

"Classic" Tweet
A tweet that simply answers the question "What are you doing?"

Fake Twitter
A twitter who poses as a real or fictional person and tweets in character. Darth Vader and Steve Jobs are popular Fake Twitters.

D
A direct message to a twitter or the act of sending a direct message to a twitter (i.e. @RickMacMerc – I just D’d you)

L:
A method by which a twitter can inform the Twittersphere and sites such as Twittervision of the twitter’s geographic location (e.g. L:home=02134)

"Look At Me" Tweet
Found on the opposite side of a very thin line between it and Twitter Spam, these tweets direct twitters via web links to the tweet poster’s own website or to web content that promotes that poster in some way.

This practice is frowned upon by some twitters and exercised by some of the most popular twitters.

Mass Follow
To add large numbers of twitters to ones friends list in order to take advantage of Reciprocal Following and, thus, increase ones ranking on Twitterholic. Approximately 20% of the people one adds to ones friends list will reciprocate. Therefore, if one adds 7,000 twitters to ones friends list, 1,400 will reciprocally follow.

It is largely believed that those who Mass Follow do not pay much attention to any tweets on the Twittersphere. Those who reciprocally follow them eventually grow tired of the lack of response and feedback they receive from the Mass Follower and soon remove them from their friends list.

/me Tweet
A tweet written in the third person and formatted in such a way that it is understood that it is invisibly prefaced with the twitter’s username. (e.g. is posting to his blog) These tweets are similar to IRC posts such as "/me is posting to his blog" where the tag "/me" is replaced with the username when it is displayed by the IRC service.

"Non Sequitur" Tweet
A tweet that doesn’t answer the question “What are you doing” but expresses a random thought unconnected to the greater thread of the Twittersphere.

Nudge
To figuratively poke at a twitter to remind them to tweet.

Private Twitter
A twitter who does not tweet to the public list but only shares tweets with twitters he or she has added to his or her own friends list. You may add a Private Twitter to your friends list but you will not receive his or her tweets unless the Private Twitter adds you to his or her friends list.

"Quote" tweet
A tweet that quotes a line from a movie, television show or song. This post may or may not reformat the line to make it better answer the question "What are you doing?"

Reciprocal Following
A practice among twitters to add to their list of friends anyone who follows them.

"Self-Absorbed" Tweet
A tweet that has no meaning to anyone but the twitter who posted it. Most tweets potentially fall under this heading depending on the particular twitter.

Tweet
A post made to Twitter.

The act of posting to Twitter.

Tweet Fiction
A fictional tweet.

Twitter
A service that poses the question "What are you doing?" and affords you a method by which to answer the question, in 140 characters or less, and share that answer across the internet with others via SMS, web, chat and various desktop applications.

Also, a term used to describe one who uses Twitter.

Twitter Chat
A series of tweets between 2 or more twitters that forms a conversation.

This practice is frowned upon by a majority of twitters.

Twitter Character
See Fake Twitter.

Twitter Chat Fragment
The incomplete portion of a Twitter Chat that one receives due to having not added all members of the Twitter Chat to ones own friends list.

Twitter Lurker
A twitter who rarely if ever tweets. John Edwards and Amber MacArthur or popular Twitter Lurkers with thousands of followers but only a few dozen tweets.

Twitter Purist
A twitter who only posts "Classic" Tweets.

Twitter Sheep
The followers of members of the Twitterati. This term is often used derogatorily.

Twitter Snob
A twitter who seldom if ever replies to @s or Ds sent by those outside an elite subsection of their friends list. The term is often undeservedly applied. Twitter Snob is an epithet that is often attached to Twitter Purists.

Twitter Spam
Posts typically of the same nature as email, comment and other spam that are submitted to the Twittersphere to taint the public list. All tweets are accessible from Twitter.com and are scanned by Google, so any link posted to Twitter serves to bolster the linked website’s Google ranking.

Twitterati
Twitters who have a strong influence on the Twittersphere with many followers and posts.

Twitterbot
A twitter who uses scripting or other method to automatically tweet or even a manually updated Twitter account that serves as a presence on the Twittersphere for a website, podcast or other such entity. Twitterbots commonly post weather information, website status or news updates from RSS feeds.

Twittersphere
The Twitter public list, Twitter.com, all sites (such as Twitterholic and Twittervision) which present the vastness of Twitter for easy consumption, and of course the Twitters themselves.

URL reduction
A function of Twitter that automatically replaces long URLs with URLs from TinyURL.com.