Glossary

AFAIK:

Abbreviation of As Far as I Know.

bot:

An account run by an automated program. You can find good bots, such as the ones that pull in all breaking news headlines from a media outlet. But you also can find bad bots, which put out only generic tweets, usually filled with links to Internet marketing sites or porn. You can often spot these bots by a generic "hot chick" avatar or their uneven follower/following ratio (meaning that they're following hundreds or thousands of people but have only a few following them back).

DIAF:

Abbreviation of Die in a Fire; expresses extreme anger with a person or about an idea.

direct messages:

Private messages sent to specific Twitter users in your network (abbreviated DMs).

dweet:

A tweet sent while under the influence. Drunken tweeting can be amusing for your Twitter stream, but it can have lasting consequences for you because Google indexes all tweets. Be careful with dweeting!

early adopter:

The enthusiastic people, often closely tied to the Silicon Valley digital-media community, who tend to be the first to use a new gadget or technology. Twitter's early adopters, for example, are the ones who joined before or during the SXSW (South by Southwest) conference in March 2007, when Twitter made its first big splash.

FailWhale:

The image of a cartoon whale that appears when you try to load a page on the Twitter.com domain when the domain's servers are overloaded. In Twitter's early days, the tiny startup was known for unreliability because its rapid ...

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