Finding what you want on Twitter

Mohammed Bryan

06 March 2010

And you have likely also visited Twitter in an effort to see what all the excitement is about, only to leave in disappointment. Here is how to destroy thru the Twitter barrier and essentially use the tool to follow things that folk are talking about. Say you hear that actor X has a Twitter feed, and you would like to follow her. The difficulty with following folk on Twitter is that their Twitter user name isn't the name by which they're known. So you've got to use some special tools to search the parts of Twitter - specifically, user profiles - that aren't part of the everyday Twitter search. You can start by using Twitter's own Find Folk link, found in the box of links to the higher right of your Twitter account. Find Folk searches thru all the profile info that Twitter members have supplied - that might be a lot or little. Search for "Britney Spears," as an example, and you finish up with quite a lengthy list of Twitter members who've Britney Spears somewhere in their profiles. When folk on Twitter wish to make it simple for others to follow messages on a selected subject, they predate a key word in the message with a number sign ( ). And people who wished to find messages on these topics could search for them by utilizing those hashtags. Hashtags aren't case-sensitive, incidentally, so a search for either Chile or chile will return the same messages. And any one can make a new hashtag by using the number sign before a word, with no space between the number sign and the word. Or you can simply go for the straightforwardness of the single search field of Hashtags.org, which searches hashtags by default. If you start to use Twitter continually - to follow folk, subjects, the newest news, or to send out your own tweets - adopting one of the well-liked 3rd party Twitter front end applications will make you much more productive. The program also makes it very easily followed people, re-tweet their messages, send direct messages, and view profiles. Just visit the Seesmic website, type in your Twitter account references, and after a short verification process, Twitter returns you to Seesmic, where you can organise info in much the same way that you can with TweetDeck. Seesmic offers one for both Android and Blackberry, and TweetDeck has an app for iPhone.