WHAT IS TWITTER AND WHY DOES IT KEEP FOLLOWING ME AROUND?

WHAT IS TWITTER AND WHY DOES IT KEEP FOLLOWING ME AROUND?

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."


Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."


WHY TWITTER IS USEFUL
Twitter has many uses for both personal and business use. It's a great way to keep in touch with your friends and quickly broadcast information about where you are and what you're up to. For example, "I'm downtown and aching for some sushi. Anyone like to join me?"

For business, Twitter can be used to broadcast your company's latest news and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy internal collaboration and group communication.

HOW TO USE TWITTER

GETTING STARTED

Visit the Twitter website and click "Join for free" to create your account. Consider using your real name as your user name to help your friends find you more easily.

Once your account is created, login and click "Settings." From here, you can setup your account details, manage your password, register your mobile phone and IM account, configure how you receive Notices, upload your photo and customize your account's design.

Your Twitter page is located at twitter.com/your-username

SENDING MESSAGES

You can "tweet" from your Twitter page, your mobile phone, IM account, or via a third-party Twitter client.



From your Twitter page: S imply enter a message in the text field at the top of the page and click "Update."
From your mobile phone: Send an SMS message to 40404.
From your IM account: Send a message to either twitter@twitter.com (Jabber/GTalk) or TwitterIM (AOL).
Your tweet will be displayed to your followers, either on their Twitter page, mobile phone, or any other way they are setup to receive Twitter updates.

FOLLOWING OTHER TWITTER USERS

Finding and adding friends to your "Twitterverse" is easy.



From the Twitter website: Login to your account, visit your friends' Twitter pages and click "Follow" underneath their photo. If your friend's account is public, you will immediately start seeing their tweets on your page, otherwise your friend will need to approve you before you can see their updates.
From your mobile phone or IM account: Send the command follow username.
See the Twitter website for a complete reference of Twitter Commands.

@REPLIES AND DIRECT MESSAGES

When you send a message with @username at the beginning, it's understood that your message is intended for that specific user, but all your followers can still see the tweet. Note that for the intended recipient to see your message on their home page, they must be following you, otherwise they will only see your message on the Replies tab.

To send a friend a private tweet, use the Direct command: d username message.

HOW TO NETWORK WITH TWITTER

The following blog posts are aimed at bloggers and other professionals who would like to use Twitter for business.

How to Get More Twitter Followers
5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence
Building Your Twitter Presence Part 2 - Pre-Prepared Tweets
Building Your Twitter Presence Part 3 - TweetBaiting
8 Tips for Power Networking on Twitter
14 Ways To Get Unfollowed on Twitter
TWITTER IN THE NEWS

Twitter Implicated in Break Up Between Aniston and Mayer (03/29/09)
Twitter's Tweet Smell Of Success (03/18/09)
The Future, Growth and Monetization of Twitter (06/11/08)
Twitter refuses to ban abusive users (05/22/08)
Why Twitter Matters: Can the fledgling microblogging service become a social media powerhouse to rival giants like Facebook—or will it be gobbled up? (05/15/08)
Twitter Emerges as Key Communications Channel in China Quake (05/13/08)
Twitter Gaining Momentum But Still Niche (04/29/08)
TWITTER TOOLS

Subscribe to the Twitter Tools RSS feed and get notified of the latest tools added to tweeternet.

Twittfilter
Pre-define which Twitter follower notifications you'd like to receive.
Twimailer
Enhanced Twitter follower notification service.
topify
Provides more user details in Twitter follow email notifications.
TwitterJobSearch
Twitter Job Search Engine
TwitPwr
When you use the TwitPwr short url service, clicks you drive are tracked and you'reawared a Power Rating. Your Twitter Power shows how effective you are at getting your followers to take action (in other words, CTR.)
ExecTweets
Find and Follow Top Business Execs on Twitter
Top Twitter Friends
Who do you talk to most often on Twitter? Who are your closest friends? What does your social network look like? Analyze your Twitterverse.
Tweetizen
Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you. Use Tweetizen to create twitter groups, and you'll be able to stay on top of what's happening in all your areas of interest.
Twe2
Twe2 is Free Twitter SMS alerts in Europe and beyond.
WeFollow
A User Powered Twitter Directory
Tweetree
Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post.
StockTwits.com
StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data - using Twitter as the content production platform - and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.
Peeckr.com
New search engine for Twitter focused on links. available in both French and English.
DestroyTwitter
DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR.
Twaitter
The Twitter message scheduling platform
FriendOrFollow.com
Who's not following you back? Who aren't you following?
SocialToo - Your Companion to the Social Web!
SocialToo complements your social experience by providing you with all the tools and automated processes you need to get the most you can from those you follow on the web.
twemes.com
Twemes.com follows Twitter.com tweets (messages) that have embedded tags that start with a # character. These are sometimes called hashtags but we like to use the term twemes.
Filttr
Filttr aims to enhance your Twitter experience with a client that automatically filters content from your followers using an algorithm dubbed FLAI (Filttr Artificial Intelligence) and offers a slew of additional features.
TwitterBerry
TwitterBerry is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don't need to use SMS.
TwitterCounter
Detailed statistics for your twitter account.
twitbacks
Custom Twitter Background Image Creator
Twitter Groups
Expand your Twitter experience by sharing links, using tags and allowing other peeps to follow you and join your group. Create a new Group or Join an existing group. Follow people with the same interests as you. Find new people to follow. Let people follow you. Share your favorite articles, deals, photos, videos, blogs, websites, links and more! Create and promote your own groups... It is that simple...
TweetChat
TweetChat helps put your blinders on to the Twitter-sphere while you monitor and chat about one topic.
TwitterGadget
TwitterGadget is a clean, robust, web 2.0 style client for Twitter.com, designed to eliminate the need to install third-party applications to monitor and submit status updates to Twitter via your iGoogle homepage.
Just Tweet It
THE Directory for Twitter Users
Twollo
Auto follow - Enabling you to automatically follow the conversations that are important to you. Tell us what you like, and we do the hard work of finding the conversations that you should be involved in.
Bulk Twitter Import Tool
Follow a big list of users with a single import.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
TwitPic
TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter
Twinfluence
Twitter Influence Analyzer
Twittad
TwittAd was formed to give Twitter users and advertisers the opportunity to meet for product placement & website promotion on a Twitter user profile. Our goal is to not fill Twitter with ugly & obnoxious advertisements. We give advertisers templates and ideas to help keep the integrity of Twitter background images.
Spaz
An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
TwitterCritic
Film reviews by twitter users.
Twanslate
@twanslate is a Twitter Bot capable of translating anything you throw at it. Great for on the go translation when all you have is your phone.
Twiddict
Twiddict, a new Twitter support service, allows users to check whether Twitter.com is up and running or not. As soon as Twitter is back on its feet, Twiddict sends the users a message letting them know is well once again in Twitterland. While the site is
Twitzu
Twitzu is a new Twitter application that makes creating events and sharing them with your Twitter world a breeze.
twizon
Twizon is a Twiiter + Amazon mashup. Twizon lists all the tweets referencing Amazon deals. Find out what’s popular, and where to get it.
MadTwitter
MadTwitter is a Windows application that lets you read “twits” written by your friends and publish your own. It’s inspired in Twitterrific, a really nice application for Mac.
Twitscoop
Through an automated algorithm, Twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual, displaying the results in a tag cloud.
Tweet Boards
Allows you to create a "board" showing you all the tweeters you want to see at once.
Twitag
Twitag is a #tag finder for Twitter, facilitating and organizing the most recent content tagged by users.
TweetLists
TweetLists organizes the most recent links found on the public timeline on Twitter based on various criteria.
TweetSmart
TweetSmart is a real–time, ever–evolving link blog and running commentary on the best of the Web.
Twellow.com
Twellow.com collects, analyzes, and categorizes tweets, creating niche-specific categories that you can search to find Twitter users with similar interests.

Read more!

DTD - The Document Type Declaration

DTD - The Document Type Declaration

A DTD is a Document Type Definition, also know as DOCTYPE. In a document served as text/html, the DOCTYPE informs the browswer how to interpret the content of the page.

If the the doctype is not declared, the browser assumes you don’t know how to code, and goes into "quirks mode". If you know what you are doing and include a correct XHTML DOCTYPE, your page will be rendered in "standards mode".




A DTD is a Document Type Definition, also know as DOCTYPE. In a document served as text/html, the DOCTYPE informs the browswer how to interpret the content of the page.

If the the doctype is not declared, the browser assumes you don’t know how to code, and goes into "quirks mode". If you know what you are doing and include a correct XHTML DOCTYPE, your page will be rendered in "standards mode".


All of the above declarations will inform the browser to render the browser in standards mode. When authoring document is HTML or XHTML, it is important to Add a Doctype declaration. The declaration must be exact — both in spelling and in case. And, the URL must be included. If not, you risk having your page rendered in quirks mode. A list of the DTD’s and how browsers handle them can be found at http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

There are other DTD’s, such as for MathML and "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd"> for mobile. A list of valid DTDs is maintained at http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

The XML declaration for XHTML web pages of is optional. Older browsers such as IE5 for the Mac choke on this. And, if you include it, IE6 renders in quirks mode, but IE7 renders in standards. So, for now, omit it. But, if you do include it, it must be the very first line, before the DTD


Why is quirks mode bad? Ever code a page and have the font inside your data tables be huge? That’s because in quirks mode browsers render td’s based on the browser default, not on the declared body default size. The box model is rendered differently and images as block instead of inline.

Why are DTD’s good? In addition to everything above, a DTD enables you to have valid code. To test validity, a page is compare to the rules for that document type. If you don’t have rules, how do you compare it? The DTD tells the validator what rules to use.

What is the difference between strict and transitional? Transitional allows depreciated tags and attributes to pass validation. The strict doctype is strict: depreciated tags and attributes will fail to validate under a strict doctype and may well display incorrectly as well. See Comparing XHTML and HTML, Strict and Transitional and Deprecated Elements and Attributes.

What does PUBLIC mean? In the above DOCTYPEs, all of them include the term "PUBLIC". If you are creating your own DTD then put your DTD on your sever and include the term "SYSTEM" with the path to your DTD file. On the other hand, if you are using PUBLIC DTD’s, such as those listed above, and the public identifier which starts with -//.

Read more!

Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!

Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!

by JEFFREY ZELDMAN
You’ve done all the right stuff, but your site doesn’t look or work as it should in the latest browsers.

You’ve written valid XHTML and CSS. You’ve used the W3C standard Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate dynamic page elements. Yet, in browsers designed to support these very standards, your site is failing. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame.

This little article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explain the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags.
by JEFFREY ZELDMAN
You’ve done all the right stuff, but your site doesn’t look or work as it should in the latest browsers.

You’ve written valid XHTML and CSS. You’ve used the W3C standard Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate dynamic page elements. Yet, in browsers designed to support these very standards, your site is failing. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame.

This little article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explain the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags.

WHY A DOCTYPE?
Per HTML and XHTML standards, a DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

As mentioned in previous ALA articles (and in other interesting places), DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

A recent DOCTYPE that includes a full URI (a complete web address) tells these browsers to render your page in standards–compliant mode, treating your (X)HTML, CSS, and DOM as you expect them to be treated.

Using an incomplete or outdated DOCTYPE—or no DOCTYPE at all—throws these same browsers into “Quirks” mode, where the browser assumes you’ve written old-fashioned, invalid markup and code per the depressing industry norms of the late 1990s.

In this setting, the browser will attempt to parse your page in backward–compatible fashion, rendering your CSS as it might have looked in IE4, and reverting to a proprietary, browser–specific DOM. (IE reverts to the IE DOM; Mozilla and Netscape 6 revert to who knows what.)

Clearly, this is not what you want. But it is often what you’ll get, due to the preponderance of incorrect or incomplete DOCTYPE information this article hopes to correct.

(Note: The Opera browser does not play by these rules; it always attempts to render pages in standards–compliant mode. Go, Opera! On the other hand, Opera does not yet offer solid support for the W3C DOM. But they’re working on it.) {Ed: Since this article was first published, Opera has delivered the DOM-compliant Opera 7 browser.}

WHERE HAVE ALL THE DOCTYPES GONE?
Since DOCTYPES are vital to the proper functioning of web standards in browsers, and since W3C is a leading creator of web standards, you might expect W3C’s website to provide a listing of proper DOCTYPEs, and you might also expect to be able to find this information quickly and easily in a single location. But as of this writing, you can’t. {Ed. Prompted in part by this article, the W3C now lists standard DOCTYPEs on its site. You will find the listing a few screens into the W3C tutorial, “My Web site is standard. And yours?”}

W3.org is not A List Apart, WebReference, or Webmonkey. It’s not intended to help web designers, developers, and content folks get up to speed on the latest technological recommendations and practices. That’s not its job.

W3C does publish a series of tutorials, though most web developers are unaware of it. Mainly, though, W3C’s site houses a collection of proposals, drafts, and Recommendations, written by geeks for geeks. And when I say geeks, I don’t mean ordinary web professionals like you and me. I mean geeks who make the rest of us look like Grandma on the first day She’s Got Mail.™

You can search for DOCTYPEs all day at w3.org without finding one page that lists them all. And when you do hunt down a DOCTYPE (generally in relation to a particular Recommendation or Working Draft), it’s often one that won’t work on your site.

Scattered throughout W3C’s site are DOCTYPEs with missing URIs, and DOCTYPEs with relative URIs that point to documents on W3C’s own site. Once removed from W3C’s site and used on your web pages, these URIs point to non–existent documents, thus fouling up your best efforts and the browser’s.

For instance, many sites sport this DOCTYPE, copied and pasted directly from w3.org:

"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
If you look at the last part of the DOCTYPE (“DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”), you’ll see that it is a relative link to a document on W3C’s site. Since that document is on W3C’s site but not yours, the URI is useless to the browser.

The DOCTYPE you’d actually want to use is:


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Notice that the latter DOCTYPE includes a complete URI at the end of the tag. Since the tag provides a valid location on the web, the browser knows where to find it, and will render your document in standards–compliant mode.

DOCTYPES THAT WORK
So what DOCTYPEs should we use? Glad you asked. The following complete DOCTYPEs are the ones we need:

HTML 4.01 STRICT, TRANSITIONAL, FRAMESET
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
XHTML 1.0 STRICT, TRANSITIONAL, FRAMESET
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
XHTML 1.1 DTD
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
NEXT STEPS
How can you help improve support for standards on the web? Besides bookmarking this page (and copying and pasting these DOCTYPEs for your own use), if your web editor inserts DOCTYPEs, you might want to check them out and compare them to the list above.

Many well–intentioned software makers have cut and pasted incomplete DOCTYPEs from W3C into their software. Result: when you use these programs’ built–in functionality to insert DOCTYPEs in your pages, the browsers go into Quirks mode, undoing all your hard work.

It’s worth contacting the folks who make your favorite authoring package, showing them the proper DOCTYPEs, and politely requesting them to address this issue in an incremental upgrade. (In some cases, you may also be able to modify your editor yourself.) Read more!