If you use Twitter, there is a well-kept secret about starting your tweets with @. If the first character in your tweet is a Twitter address (e.g. @joeblow), only the people that follow both you and @joeblow will be able to see the tweet.
Here is how it works:
Tweet: I am good friends with @joeblow
Who Sees It: Anyone that follows me
Tweet: @joeblow and I are good friends
Who Sees It: Only people that follow BOTH @joeblow and me. This is handy if you are only wanting a known group to see it, but not real handy if you are expecting everyone to be able to see it.
Tweet: .@joeblow and I are good friends
Who Sees It: Everyone because I started the message with a period. The period can be any character other than the @ or D (D is syntax for direct message). I usually use the period because it’s unobtrusive.
This particular bit of fun bit a good friend of mine today, so I thought I would share it in case others also might have made this mistake.
Hope this helps someone!
One of the things I would like to see from Twitter is the ability to redirect traffic from one account to another. For instance, if I owned @scottbarstow and @sbarstow, I would like for people to be able to follow @sbarstow but get the content from @scottbarstow without me having to post it in both accounts. I would essentially be able to alias multiple usernames to one top-level username.
Ideally I would be able to treat the followers of multiple accounts as one group of followers for purposes of things like Klout score, etc.
I did some poking around on this topic and there has been remarkably little said about it, at least publicly. It seems like something that people would find useful. There are lots of applications that let you manage multiple Twitter accounts from the same cockpit. This is something different, however.
Seems like a pretty easy technical hurdle to leap to me. Is anyone aware of this capability, and I am just not finding it?
Would anyone else find this useful? Drop me a comment.
Tonight I posted a tweet about hating my iPhone. It happens from time to time. I promptly received two or three replies from Twitter bots offering me new Apple gear. Does anyone know if there is a plugin yet for TweetDeck to block TWAM? If not, there needs to be.
I read about a company that has a blocker ( aptly named TweetBlocker ) that allows you to assess someone’s spam grade in Twitter. Would love to see this integrated so I can weed out these nefarious do-badders.
This morning I was doing some testing on an application I am building for work, and wanted to set up my Twitter account to forward my SMS messages to my Google Voice account. The setup for Twitter’s mobile integration requires that you send a text message to Twitter’s short code to get things rolling.
I went to Google Voice and promptly sent the required message to Twitter. Sadly, I immediately received an error back. After doing some poking around, it appears that Google Voice does NOT support short codes for SMS, or at the very least they support very few of them ( depending on who you read ).
Has anyone out there found a way around this? This seems like a major hole in the functionality of Google Voice’s SMS feature. If I want to have “One Number For Life” as was the promise of Grand Central back in the day, I need to be able to do it all with that number.
Post a comment here if you have found a way around this, or I am missing something. Here is a link to the thread I found on the Voice support forum.
