Mom This is how twitter works.

Mom This is How Twitter Works


Twitter is an online social networking tool in which users post 140 character updates of what is going on in their lives along with links to things they think are interesting, funny, or useful to their followers (“following” being essentially what “friending” is on other sites). People use twitter in many ways, some as a newsfeed by following prominent people or networks, some as a pseudo-chatroom by limiting their followers and whom they follow to close friends and family, and some as a microblog for updating people about the work they are doing and their personal lives.
“TWITTER USERS”




@me
follows @mymom, @mybrother, and @mycat




@mymom
follows @me and @mybrother




@mybrother
follows @me and @mymom




@mycat
follows @me




@fanperson
follows @me, but I do not follow him




@totalstranger
doesn’t follow any of us and we do not follow her
Twitter users choose who they do and do not follow. They have total control of what news they receive on their homepage. When I refer to your “homepage”, I’m referring to the feed that you see when signed into twitter containing your and your followers tweets. This is different from your personal twitter page (twitter.com/yourusername) which contains all of your tweets including your replies to other users. You can have an unlimited amount of followers, but only follow a select few people if you want, making it easy to stay in touch with the people you care to stay in touch with. (FYI these are fake twitter names, my (the author’s) actual twitter username is @jessicahische.)
WHO SEES WHAT
THE PERSON TWEETING IS PICTURED • THEIR TWEET IS THE LARGE TEXT
VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION IS IN RED

me Jessica Hische
I am a compulsive oversharer!


• anyone that follows @me will see this on their homepage

fanperson John McGraphicdesign
@me OMG ME TOO! It’s like a disease!


• because I do not follow @fanperson, this does not show up on my homepage, instead this shows up in my @mentions feed

• because @fanperson put my username at the beginning, it does not show up on @fanperson’s followers’ homepages

me Jessica Hische
@mybrother hey bro, que pasa?


• by putting another person’s username at the start of a statement, it limits who sees it

• @me, @mymom, and @mybrother see this on our homepages because we all follow each other

• people that follow both @me and @mybrother will see this on their homepages

• people that only follow one of us will not see this on their homepage

• @mybrother will see this in his @mentions feed as well as his homepage because we follow each other

mybrother Jessica’s Brother
Not much, @me. What’s good?


• anyone that follows @mybrother will see this on their homepage, whether they follow @me or do not follow @me

• If a username is not at the start of a statement, everyone that follows @mybrother can see it

• I will see this in my @mentions feed because my username is used within the tweet

• This is generally the incorrect way to reply. There are times when you want to share a reply with your followers (e.g. if your reply contains something useful for your followers) but not in this circumstance or similar circumstances

mymom Jessica’s Mom
.@mybrother only ate pizza from age 5 to 25. #turtlepower


• if you DO want to share a reply with your followers, you can put any character before their username (typically a period) and this allows all of your followers to see it. It takes the person’s username and puts it “in the middle” of the tweet.

me Jessica Hische
@mymom @mybrother so. full. of. pizza.


• @me, @mymom, and @mybrother see this on our homepages because we all follow each other

• people that follow @me and @mymom (both of us) will see this on their homepages

• only the first user mentioned at the beginning and my username control who sees this tweet, any users mentioned after, even directly after, does not affect this

totalstranger Mary O’Internet
Have you seen @me‘s new zany website thingy??


• because I do not follow @totalstranger, this does not show up on my homepage

• instead this shows up in my @mentions feed—as long as your username is somewhere in their post, it will be in your @mentions feed

• because my username is in the middle of the statement, this does show up on @totalstranger’s followers’ homepages

• @totalstranger does not follow me, but can still @mention me in a tweet and I will see it in my @mentions feed

me Jessica Hische
@mycat you puked on my bed this morning, not cool.
favorite • retweet • reply

mycat Billy Kibbles Hische
@me I iz sorries!
favorite • retweet • reply

me Jessica Hische
@mycat It’s ok, you are still my everything <3
favorite • retweet • reply


• @mymom @mybrother and @fanperson do not see this conversation on their homepages because they do not follow both of us

• @mycat and @me will see each others tweets in our @mentions feed as well as our homepages because we follow each other

• twitter.com added a “reply” feature recently which allows you to see a conversation string. There is a difference between “replying to” a tweet and simply beginning a tweet with a person’s username. The former will keep the conversation in tact, and the latter will not. The tweets look identical except that one shows that a tweet is “in reply to” another and one does not. On twitter.com, the signifier that a tweet is part of a conversation is the little speech bubble in the upper right corner.

• if someone went to our personal twitter pages they could see everything we are writing back and forth, but very few people are likely to do this. In this way, any tweets that you write are not 100% private even if directed at another user. The only way to make sure a conversation is 100% private is to exchange direct messages
DIRECT MESSAGING
Direct Messages are private tweets (to other twitter users / the general public) that are exchanged between two users that follow each other. You cannot direct message someone that does not follow you and vice versa. Direct messages are the only private way to converse on twitter. “DM’s” are basically like emails that are limited to 140 characters per exchange. They are unsearchable on twitter.
RETWEETING

me Jessica Hische
Check out this cat vid! tinyurl.com/2funnycats

me Jessica Hische
RT @me Check out this cat vid! tinyurl.com/2funnycats

mymom Jessica’s Mom
Check out this cat vid! tinyurl.com/2funnycats (via @me)

me Jessica Hische retweeted by mybrother
Check out this cat vid! tinyurl.com/2funnycats
favorite • unretweet • reply
Retweeting or “RT”ing is used when you want to forward along a tweet that someone else said to your followers. There are a few ways to do this. It is very easy on twitter.com as they built in a native retweet feature. Native retweet is a feature in many mobile and desktop apps as well and is generally the best way to go. The bottom tweet shows a native retweet, which has a little symbol in the upper left corner and states whom it was retweeted by at the top. One of the most common other ways to RT is to copy the full tweet including the person’s username and put “RT” before it. Your followers then know that whatever comes next was said by that user. Another way to retweet is to quote the user by writing “via @username” at the end of the copied tweet. Just be sure not to replace the original author of the tweet with the newest person to retweet it.
HASHTAGS

fanperson John McGraphicdesign
Having tons of fun at the #imaginaryconference!
Hashtags are a way to label tweets so that other users can see tweets on the same topic. Hashtags contain no spaces or punctuation and begin with a “#” symbol. Many times at events like conferences or concerts, the organizers will tell attendees to add a particular hash tag to their tweets to gather opinions about the event and unite people at the same event.

me Jessica Hische
Paula Abdul & Color Me Badd was #myfirstconcert! You?
Twitter users create trending topics by using hash tags. For instance, a user might create a hashtag as a fun way to start a conversation.

mybrother Jessica’s Brother
When will this cough stop?? #imeanreally. #srsly. #cough.
Lastly, hashtags are used to punctuate statements or jokes on twitter. Some twitter users make sentence-long hashtags for comic effect.
TWITTER VS. FACEBOOK
Twitter is different from Facebook because it has an opt-in take on friending vs. an opt-out like Facebook. If you accept a friend request on Facebook, you automatically “follow” each other (Facebook does not use “following” but has a newsfeed that is quite similar to twitter). This means that if you have 200 Facebook friends, you can potentially see 200 people’s news in your feed (they have algorithms which narrow it down to who you most likely want to see, but still. If there is someone annoying in your feed you have to opt-out of following them or “hide” them). On twitter, you can be followed by 2,000 people but only see 50 people in your feed—50 people you CHOSE to follow. The main difference between the two is that Twitter is much more simplified. There is a character limit to posts, there are no picture or video libraries, and no complicated profiles, relationship statuses, etc. Because of this, Twitter has become the top choice for professionals that want a social / semi-work-related network through which they can share work news (and not feel smarmy) alongside personal news. Many people (myself included) link their twitter account to their facebook account so that they can post to facebook from twitter.
IN CONCLUSION
Twitter is awesome, but while it seems like a relatively simple service, it is quite nuanced. I hope this site helped you or someone you know get acquainted with twitter so that you can stop writing your tweets incorrectly, accidentally airing your dirty laundry to the internet at large. I am not an employee of twitter, just an avid (understatement) user of the service that wanted to lend a hand to twitter n00bs. This site is not a comprehensive guide as twitter is always adding new subtle features to make their service more useful and user-friendly, but this should demystify most of the basics. You can always visit support.twitter.com to find out more.

ABOUT:Jessica Hische is, for the most part, a letterer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. “mom, this is how twitter works” is one of many silly internet projects she has created in recent history, the largest of which being Daily Drop Cap and the stupidest of which being The Internet Sends Me Cake. Please visit Jessica’s portfolio site to view what she ACTUALLY does for a living and to read about the latest zany internet projects she has created.

50 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT FACEBOOK

50 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT FACEBOOK

Facebook has over 350 million active users. More than 35 million users update their status each day, with more than 55 million status updates each day.f
More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.f
The average Facebook user has 130 friends and sends eight friend requests per month.f
Among children under 18, Facebook was ranked third in the top 100 searches of 2009, behind YouTube and Google. Sex and porn rounded out the top five searches.ae
A recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate applicants. Thirty-eight percent of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the applicant.i
Facebook is not only beating MySpace traffic, but it is also the second-ranked site overall in the U.S. behind Google.x
Americans spend 13.9 billion minutes a year on Facebook and five billion minutes on MySpace.x
In 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, where he placed photos of undergraduates side by side so viewers could rank which one was “hotter.” Zuckerberg would later turn Facemash into the now ubiquitous Facebook.m



A woman slept with 50 men she met on her Facebook page titled “I Need Sex”
In 2008, a 23-year-old woman named Lauren Michaels created a group titled “I Need Sex” on Facebook. Within 10 minutes, she had 35 members and soon attracted 100—50 of whom she eventually slept with. Facebook has since removed her page.e
An 18-year-old Wisconsin man posed as several different girls on Facebook to blackmail underage male teens into performing sexual favors by coaxing them to send nude photos of themselves. He could be facing up to 300 years in prison.ac
Beacon, part of Facebook’s controversial advertisement system that broadcasted information about a user’s shopping activity on other sites, was the target of a class action lawsuit in 2009. The resulting settlement required Facebook to pay $9.5 million into a settlement fund.l
If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, afterChina, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.ag
In 2009, an EMT at the crime scene took a cell phone picture of the body of a New York woman who had been strangled and beaten and then posted it on his Facebook profile. He was later arrested on charges of official misconduct and was fired from his job.t
The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales warned that Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide because such sites encourage teens to build transient relationships and dehumanize community life.af
Facebook includes eating disorder groups such as “Get Thin or Die Trying,” and “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (“What nourishes me destroys me”). While such eating disorder sites were typically anonymous on the Web, their growing presence on Facebook makes them more public and accessible to more people.h
The New Oxford Dictionary announced that the 2009 Word of the Year was “unfriend,” as in “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site” such as Facebook. However, there is some debate whether the word should be “defriend” rather than “unfriend.”l
A 39-year-old Pennsylvania father was arrested for openly asking his 13-year-old daughter for sex over Facebook.o
While stressing that correlation does not equal causation, a recent poll suggested that Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users.m
While initially created for college students, Facebook users over the age 26 now represent 60% of the total U.S. Facebook population.a



The average user spends more than 55 minutes a day on Facebook
The average Facebook users spend more than 55 minutes a day on the site. They use the Like button nine times a month and write 25 comments each month.f
Approximately 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States.ab
Forbes dubbed 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, the creator/owner of Facebook, as the world’s youngest billionaire, worth 1.5 billion.l
Syria, China, Vietnam, and Iran have banned Facebook.l
In December 2009, there were over 250 million active users on Facebook, up from 1 million active users in December 2004.j
Tim Sparapani, director of public policy at Facebook, stated that hundreds of millions of people had never stopped and thought about the consequences of sharing information online.u
Information deemed public—such as profile pictures, names, cities, and networks—are available to developers of any applications that Facebook users or their Facebook friends use on the site.u
The first person to invest in Facebook was the cofounder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in June 2004.k
In 2005, East Asia’s richest man, Li Hu Shing, invested $120 million dollars in Facebook.l
In September 2009, Zuckerberg announced for the first time that Facebook was cash flow positive, meaning Facebook made more money that it spent.c
Lamebook.com is a regularly updated site that reposts “lame” and funny Facebook user posts.q
In Florida, the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee ruled that Florida judges and lawyers should no longer “friend” each other on Facebook.p



Women age 55 and older are Facebook’s fastest growing demographic
Facebook’s fastest growing segment in the United States is women 55 years and older.z
In May 2009, a Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, invested $200 million in Facebook in return for a 1.96% stake in the Web site.l
Twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim Zuckerberg stole their idea after they hired him to do programming for their own site, Harvard Connect (ConnectU). The case was settled for an undisclosed sum. Others, such as fellow student, Aaron Greenspan, also claim they invented Facebook.k
Named after a Harvard student directory that included student photos and profiles, Facebook was originally called “thefacebook” and was limited to only Harvard students. In 2005, the site was renamed “Facebook.”k
When Facebook changed its privacy setting in December 2009, Zuckerberg’s previously private photos—in which he was seen shirtless, holding a teddy bear, and looking “plastered”—became public.u
Both citizens and police departments are increasingly using Facebook to catch suspected criminals.m
A “gaydar” software program developed at MIT can reportedly identify gay men on Facebook, private profile or not.v
In January 2009, an advertising campaign from Burger King titled “WHOPPER Sacrifice” rewarded Facebook users a free “Angry Whopper” for publicly deleting 10 friends, who would then receive a blunt message informing they were deleted for a free hamburger.k



U.S. Facebook users mirror the country’s ethnic population
Eleven percent of Facebook’s 100 million U.S. users are African-American, 9% are Latino, and 6% are Asian, which is a fairly accurate reflection of the U.S. general population.r
A 20-year-old IBM employee in Canada lost sick leave benefits from her insurer because her Facebook page showed “cheerful” photos while she was on paid sick leave for depression.s
Girls can be prone to anxiety and depression by talking too much to their friends on Facebook. Called “co-rumination,” frequently discussing the same problem can lead to an unhealthy obsession.n
On July 1, 2009, shortly after Michael Jackson passed away, his page became the most popular page on Facebook. Previously, the most popular person on Facebook was U.S. President Obama with just over 6 million fans.w
In Australia it is valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants on Facebook. A summons posted on Facebook is legally binding.ad
A site called Usocial offered to sell Facebook friends and fans to customers. Even after receiving a Cease and Desist from Facebook, Usocial said it will not shut down the service completely.d
A Facebook post in December 2009 led to a kidney donation.b
The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation contend that Facebook’s new “recommended” privacy settings serve Facebook more than they serve the user.u
Farmville boasts more than 60 million players on Facebook. Zynga—the maker of Farmville, Mafia Wars, and other Facebook games—boasts an annual revenue of more than $200 million.g
In the United States, 54.7% of people ages 13 to 17 have a Facebook account.y
There are more than 800,000 developers building applications for Facebook.u