Twitip

by Robert Dwyer of The Wellesley Wine Press – Follow him @RobertDwyer

A subtly confusing aspect of Twitter, even for people who have been using the service for a while, is understanding the differences between replies, mentions and direct messages. These concepts are confusing because they’re different than E-mail and aren’t necessarily the same as on other social networks like Facebook. The goal of this piece is to help well-meaning people from inadvertently annoying others on Twitter, or worse, accidentally sharing private information publicly.

This is part 2 of a 2 part series about replies, mentions and direct messages in terms of how they’re used from the Twitter web interface (Read part one here). Today we’ll talk about mentions and direct messages. (more…)

Adrianos is an Internet Defamation attorney in Los Angeles and authors the California Defamation Law Blog. Follow him @adrianos.

Let me cut to the chase. You DO NOT want to be sued on Twitter.

Being sued already stinks enough. Trust me. I know all about this because I’m a lawyer and I sue people for a living (don’t hold it against me).

But being sued for a tweet is even worse.

First off, think of what your friends will say.  “Hi John, have you seen Bill lately?” “No, he was drunk-tweeting so he got sued.”  Imagine the harassment you’d experience at the hands of your buddies.  I shudder to even think about it!

Second, imagine what your customers will say when they read about it online and the headline reads, “Drunk Twit Gets Sued For Tweets.” Think they’re going to hire you again? Probably not.

Worst of all, you could lose your privilege to Tweet under Twitter’s Terms of Service. And that would mean the end of world undoubtedly.

So how do you avoid this?  I’m going to show you 10 basic ways to avoid being sued on Twitter. (more…)

As usual, it’s Sunday here in The States and with the notion of taking things easy, I’ve drawn up a list of some of the things that have found their way into my inbox.

Let me know what you think if you’ve tried any of these tools, and if you have any you’d like to share (or any posts you’ve written on your own blog related to Twitter) please don’t hesitate to let me know about them!

• Twitoria – Many people seem to have re-discovered this one recently, as it’s been mentioned here on TwiTip before. You simply enter in your Twitter username, and select a time frame from the dropdown. You then see the number of people you’re following who haven’t updated their Twitter stream in that time. Fortunately most of the people I follow are regular updaters, but this tool is helpful in trimming down your list if you’re so inclined.
• Tweet4Blood – An interesting concept, for sure. “Using tweet 4 blood you can tweet your blood requests to followers @tweet4blood who are donors. Tweets are also hashtagged city wise for easy finding. You don’t have to login to tweet it from here. But make sure not to spam the community.” Currently seems like it’s mostly used in India, but I can see how it would be easily spread around the world.
• Print Your Twitter – Since Twitter’s archive only goes back so far, using Print Your Twitter allows you to save the history of your Twitter account, favorite hashtags (#topic), and so on, right down to your computer. What were you doing a year ago on Twitter? Find out by checking your own personal archive.
• Followformation – Helps users quickly follow dozens of categorized Twitter users. This tool is meant for Twitter users that would like to make sense out of following. For new Twitter users, this can be especially intimidating. Followformation helps the social media newcomer simplify the first few steps by dividing the top people on Twitter by categories, and automating the entire following process.

This post is a follow up to Twitter Is A Cocktail Party by Jon Reid – follow him @jonmreid

Photo by SanFranAnnie

Picture yourself in the crowded party shown above. In a party without chairs, little clusters of conversation form, and the makeup of those clusters changes quickly as people wander around. You may join a cluster because you know one of the people in it, or because you happen to overhear something interesting. Parties like this are sometimes called “mixers,” which the dictionary defines as “a social gathering where people can make new acquaintances.” Twitter was the biggest mixer in the world until Tuesday, May 12, 2009, when those conversations fell silent.

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Time for a little discussion.

I’m interested today to hear about how people came up with their Twitter user name?

My personal approach with @problogger was to use the brand and name of my blog (of the same name). I know many others have taken this approach, with their blog, website, business, product etc while others choose their actual name (or some variation of it). Others still use nick names while others invent names that they’ve not used before – just for Twitter.

How did you choose your Twitter user name? What considerations did you weigh up in that choice?

With millions of registered users on Twitter finding a great user account name is becoming harder and harder to do. So many names are taken and many of them are either ‘parked’ (saved by someone for some point in the future), unused, abandoned or dormant.

So what do you do when you really want a Twitter account but the account is inactive?

I was recently confronted with this issue when setting up this very blog. While I registered TwiTip.com early in 2008 with the hopes of starting a Twitter Tips site – I never considered registering @TwiTip as a user name here on Twitter. When it came to launching this site it dawned on me that it would be useful (and logical) to get the Twitter user name.

The problem is that it was already registered and had been for months. The frustrating part was that it was completely inactive – not a single tweet had been made. They hadn’t followed anyone and didn’t have any followers. This meant that direct messaging them wasn’t possible (you have to be mutual followers of one another to do this).

As I began to research if there was a way to get Twitter to hand over unused Twitter accounts I soon found out that there were many people with the same problem as me. There were also quite a few different opinions on whether it was possible to get these types of accounts released.

How to Secure an Unused Twitter Account

The good news is that there are a variety of ways to get an unused Twitter account. Lets start with the official response from Twitter.

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