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NYT: Nine Things You Didn't Know About Twitter
January 18, 2012
Nine Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter
By PAUL BOUTIN
Twitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems.
Look more closely, and you’ll find that Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently. Yet unlike, say, Facebook or Microsoft Office, Twitter’s power tools are easy to find and easy to figure out.
UPLOAD PHOTOS If you post a link to a photo from one of a long list of other sites, Twitter will automatically display the image in the right-hand “details” pane when another user looks at your post. These sites have a post-to-Twitter option on their image upload pages. There are 16 supported sites: DailyBooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, Ustream, Vimeo, Yfrog and YouTube.
MAKE A GALLERY Moreover, Twitter creates a photo gallery page that displays each user’s last 100 uploaded images. (There’s no similar feature for video.) An independent site, Hashalbum, automatically groups Twitter users’ images into separate albums based on any hashtags included in the post to Twitter. For example, hashalbum.com/aquapets displays all the images whose URLs were posted to Twitter with the hashtag #aquapets.
SAVE YOUR FAVORITE TWEETS Everyone seems to know that you can retweet another user’s Twitter post on your own account’s feed. But many users have never tried the star-shaped Favorite button next to Twitter’s Retweet button. Clicking on Favorite below a Twitter status update adds it to your personal Favorites list, much like bookmarking a Web page in your browser. To see your Favorites, click Profile at the top of Twitter’s Web interface, then click the Favorites tab on the left-hand side of your profile page.
