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Twitter's missing manual

eev.ee

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#11

> the analytics tools (pretty but pointless) Hah, yeah. I was curious about how these worked a while back and figured out that a tweet's "Impressions" includes any time someone reloads a timeline that includes your tweet somewhere within. This includes your own page loads, so if you open Twitter a few times throughout the day you'll see your tweets accumulate impressions by default. And if you're followed by a really…

To be fair, that's more or less what an impression is.

If you want "unique visits," you can look for unique visitors or unique impressions or just uniques, depending on what company you are working for.

(And if you are doing TV, you can get an estimate of how many people saw it on DVR in the next three days)

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#12
post #8
post #2

> Tweets may contain newlines, and there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many. 140

138 rather, because of stripped space. Edit: Actually fewer because consecutive newlines are reduced to two. so like...2/3 * 140 roughly

I wasn't sure if that was client-side or server-side, and, if client-side, if the filtering is done at submit-time or display-time. I have seen someone tweet something with many sequential newlines, so I figured that it was probably client-dependent (I use Tweetbot).

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#13
Just the other day, a tweet of mine mentioned $PATH (as in where to find executables in bash) with the unexpected result of linking to the Twitter account of path. Live and learn.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#15

Just the other day, a tweet of mine mentioned $PATH (as in where to find executables in bash) with the unexpected result of linking to the Twitter account of path. Live and learn.

This is similar to having a Github account that is an Objective-C keyword:

https://github.com/protocol https://github.com/dynamic

etc.

@IBOutlet and @IBAction appear to be available if you'd like some Swift issue spam!

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#16
post #4

Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick. People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they…

I think the more interesting thing is that Twitter itself doesn't even try. Even if you dig through ALL their help pages, only about a third of the features/quirks the blog post mentions are actually documented

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#17

> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

It's a nice and simple way to log your activities. I use it all the time. I would use Notepadd++ if it had this as a native feature, without the need of mapping a shortcut.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#18

> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

It's not an Easter Egg, it's right there in the Edit menu. Always has been, AFAIK.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#19
post #4

Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick. People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they…

The point isn't to have an actual manual but to show how complex things have grown.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#20

> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

I believe adding ".LOG" to the beginning of file also automatically inserts the date each time you open the file so you can use it as a journal. I don't have access to Windows right now to test that though.
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