Andrew Mager

Twitter is a growing network of real-time away messages which asks the simple question, “What are you doing?”

Here are five suggestions that I dreamed up to make your experience more fun:

1. Be Creative.

   Try to write favorites. A lot of users recieve updates via text message or SMS. Don’t use phrases like, “I am doing [this]” or “Eating dinner”. Don’t waste precious network resources on a bland “sleepy time” message to all of your followers.

   Don’t follow everybody that you friend either. Once you add someone, you automatically “follow” them. That is, you will receive all of their updates. To remain friends with someone, and not receive their updates, login to their page and click "Leave" username. It will save you a lot of money if you don’t have an unlimited data plan on your mobile device.

2. Use the Public Timeline.

   Trying to improve the quality of your messages? Find your Twitter voice by browsing the Public Timeline from time to time. It’s a running feed of everybody’s updates. Blink and forget to refresh the page, and you will have missed dozens of updates. By analyzing the tone and content of people’s messages, you can find your own unique dialect. You may even find someone interesting to follow.

   

3. Don’t Tweet and Run.

   Twitter allows you to easily contribute to your community. I always read a funny update on my cell phone, and I wanna immediately send that person a private message back. It’s easy, just type D + user name + your message. Tweeters also uses the @username(s) + message command to include friends in their updates.

   If one of your friends is slacking on their updating, send the command nudge + username to ask Twitter to send them a friendly reminder that it’s time to get on the ball again.

4. Goto Sleep If You Want.

   Ever wake up in the morning and your phone is flooded with new Twitter messages? Simply text sleep, and it stops sending text messages to your phone. Type wake to start recieving messages again.

5. Be accurate

   A wise woman once said, “Once you Twitter something, you can’t take it back." Once you make a promise, you gotta keep it.

   

   The more you use the service, the more you are building an authentic, personal scroll of your doings and thinkings. Five years down the road, wouldn’t you want to know exactly what you were rambling about on any given date? Imagine being able to look back at what you said about politicians, or sports teams. We have to hope that Twitter sticks around for all that work though