Twitter lives a dual life. On the one hand, it's a simple service. Besides letting you share and read very short messages, it has few bells and whistles. On the other hand, it can be surprisingly hard to figure out. The screens aren't particularly intuitive, and the jargon and symbols are obscure. Even more vexing, it's not clear at first why people are so enthusiastic about Twitter. What makes it fun? Useful? Revolutionary?
In the Introduction, we showed you a few great uses for Twitter. In this chapter, we help you get set up and explain some key ways to communicate successfully on the service. We also decode the most common jargon and symbols. (By the way, if you need a version of Twitter that works with assistive technologies, try Accessible Twitter [http://accessibletwitter.com]).
Of course, listening to others is one of the things Twitter is best for—and you don't need an account to do it. If you're all about tuning into the buzz, skip ahead to Chapter 2.
Signing up takes just a few minutes. Head to Twitter (http://twitter.com) and click the Get Started button.
The first screen you see looks like the one here. The key pieces here are the name boxes. In the Full Name box, type your actual name (or your company name, if this is a corporate account). The Username box is where you add your account name—the one everybody on Twitter will know you by (like The_Real_Shaq or Pistachio or timoreilly). For the username, try to find one with the fewest number of characters possible; that becomes important as soon as people want to refer to you or repost your comments and find that your username is taking up several of their 140 characters.
After you fill out the rest and click "Create my account," Twitter walks you through another few steps to find your friends on the service and suggest people you might want to follow. Following is described later in this chapter.
Turn the page for quick tips on fleshing out your account so that other people find it appealing.
Get The Twitter Book now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
