twitter 103 -- twitter rules and twitter lingo

I know I said last week that I would help walk you through who to follow this week, but I want to go through this with you first. I will walk you through who to follow next week, I promise.

just like everything else, twitter has a few quirky rules that you should know about:

1. you can send a tweet (twitter message) to another twitter user by starting the tweet with @(their twitter username), for example, a tweet to me would be "@carynbrown you really are a helpdesk goddess." these tweets will show up in your twitter stream on your twitter home page and in that person's twitter replies. you can do this for anyone on twitter. also, any time you put the @(their twitter username) anywhere in a tweet, it will become a link that anyone reading the tweet can click on to see that user's twitter homepage.
2. you can send direct messages through twitter that will only be seen by you and the person you send the message to. to do this, start your tweet with d (their twitter username). the one rule on this is that the person you are sending the direct message to must be following you on twitter.
   to send a tweet to someone, you use @(their twitter username), with no space between the @ and their username and to send a direct message to someone, you use d (their twitter username), with a space between the d and their username.
3. there is a following limit on twitter, I have had a hard time finding the actual rules on this (this is the closest that I have found). from my experience, you can follow up to 2000 twitter accounts, but over 2000, you can only follow 120% of the number of twitter accounts that are following you (i.e. if you have 2000 twitter followers, you can follow 2400 twitter users). here is a link to the blog post I wrote when I hit this limit for the first time. there are a couple of other blog posts that I found on this limit: Twitter Doing Damage Control On False Follow Limit Rumor, TWITTER LIMITS FOLLOWING TO 2,000, Twitter’s 2000-Follow Limit Raises A Ruckus

you don't have to be on twitter very long before you figure out that twitter has a language all it's own. here are some links to more information twitter language:
mashable's twitterspeak
twictionary
twittonary
popular twitter terms

update on 21 march 2009: here is another good blog post I found today on clarifiying the twitter rules for newbies