Twitter - what it is and how to use it - register, login, set up and start chatting on Twitter

Today I want to talk about such a popular phenomenon as Twitter. For webmasters, this social network can help attract additional visitors to your site, as well as other social networks. For example, such as, and, as well as Twitter can serve as a kind of analogue.

For example, as far as I know, many visitors to my blog site follow its updates through this microblogging service. But in order for this to work as it should, you will need to understand what Twitter is, how to register on it and how to use it.

By the way, recently the registration form and the interface of this service have been completely translated into Russian, which is good news. True, when this article was written, this social network was not yet friendly with the Russian language, so I had to rewrite and add something.

What is Twitter and how to use it?

So, what is Twitter - first of all, it is a service designed for communication. It has replaced (or supplemented) the traditional social networks that have set the teeth on edge, and its audience is growing like a snowball. Now, probably, it is already difficult to meet a person who has never heard of him or similar microblogging services (FriendFeed, etc.).

Nevertheless, for many, the essence of these services is still not clear and therefore it is worth answering the question “What is Twitter” in a little more detail. In this series of articles, I will try to tell you in detail about how to register in it (now in Russian), how to work with it, how to get subscribers (followers), how to automatically post the headings of new materials on your site into it (it will be) .

Twitter was created in 2006, and by the beginning of 2007 it had already gained enough popularity. Sometimes it is characterized as microblogging due to the fact that the size of the message left in it is limited to 140 characters. Due to this limitation, in Twitter messages using special services up to something like this: http://bit.ly/4J2b1R.

Due to the short length of messages, it is very convenient to communicate on it from a mobile phone. Actually, Twitter was designed for this, because. in it, the limit is 140 characters per message, and in a mobile phone, as you know, the limit is 160 characters (in SMS messages). The remaining 20 characters can be used for the sender's name.

But for this you will have to provide a username and password to access your Email. My main box is just on Gmail, but somehow I did not dare to transfer his password to Twitter.

If you decide to take this step, then, apparently, based on your address book, all users from it who also have an account in this microblogging service will be found. Well, you can add them to your friends.

Twitter in the time that has passed since this article was written, not only managed to start supporting the Russian language, but also acquired a new interface. Therefore, immediately after successful registration, you will be taken to a page with icons of your next steps at the very top.

The step described in the previous paragraph is now called "Friends" and has number 3:

The new interface has a new step that opens after registration - "Interests". On this tab, you can tell which topics you are interested in. Having opened one of the proposed topics, you will see the tapes available in it.

To subscribe to them you will only need to click on the button "Read" located nearby. As a result, the button will change its appearance and the inscription “Reading” will appear on it:

How to change the background for Twitter?

By default, your profile background will be blue, but you can change it, as well as the color of the panels, font color, and links on your page to your liking. For example, my Twitter looks like this.

You can also see how the interface of this service looked before. To do this, you will need to select the option “To old Twitter” from the drop-down list next to your “Username” (located in the upper right corner):

To customize the design of your page, select the “Settings” item from the top menu (see the screenshot above), and in the window that opens, select the “Design” item.

To customize the background of your Twitter page, you can use the options provided by simply clicking on them. If none of the proposed backgrounds was to your liking, then you can use your graphic file as a .

To do this, click on the "Change background image" button under the background thumbnails, click on the "Select file" button and find the desired image file on your computer.

By clicking in the Twitter settings on the "Change skin colors" button on the right under the thumbnails, you will be able to:

1. fill the background with one color that you can choose by clicking on the square labeled "background"
2. set the color of the text on your account pages by clicking on the square labeled "text"
3. select a shade for the design of all links by clicking on the square labeled "links"
4. You can select the background color and border color for the right sidebar on your Twitter web page by clicking on the "panel" and "border" squares, respectively.

After you are done with aesthetic delights, do not forget to save the changes by clicking on the appropriate button at the very bottom. I didn't notice it at first, and as a result, I had to adjust the background and design of my Twitter account all over again. In the same settings window, on the "Profile" tab, you can attach an avatar by selecting the desired picture in the "Image" area.

Select "Profile" from the top settings menu. Here you can make changes to your existing profile data, and I also advise you to add the address of your web project to the "More Info URL" field. Remarkably, he will.

But lately, search engines can still take into account, to one degree or another, backlinks from this microblogging service, which has .

How to use Twitter (now in Russian)?

By selecting the “Notifications” item from the top settings menu, you can configure: about what events you will receive messages by E-mail, for example, when someone subscribes to your feed (follows you). Directly from the sent letter, you can go to the web page of this person by clicking on his name:

After reviewing the content of his messages, you can decide to subscribe or unsubscribe to his twitter feed. To subscribe, you will need to click on the button "Read"(in the English version of the interface - "Follow", from where the legs grow from the terms follow, follow or follower) in the upper part of the window:

Subscribe to the messages of a user, or, in other words, "Follow" someone on Twitter (Follow), means to add someone to your contact list. This is what we just did by clicking on the Follow button.

But this user will not be able to see your news until they add you to their contact list. The easiest way to create a Twitter contact list is to add users with similar interests. You add them and they add you.

To do this, you can use the search on Twitter - http://search.twitter.com/. Enter your interests in the search box and as a result you will get a huge list of the inhabitants of this service who are interested in the same thing. Requests, of course, can be entered in Russian too.

As soon as you start adding people to your contact list, their messages will appear in your feed. To get into your news feed All you need to do is go to TWITTER.COM, click on the "Login" link at the very top of the window and enter your username and password that you set during registration.

If the browser remembers the username and password, then after clicking on the above address, you will immediately be taken to the news feed with messages from those Twitter users that you follow.

If you don’t like the posts of a user and you don’t want to read them anymore, you can unsubscribe from receiving messages from this user by going to his page (feed). To do this, you will need to click either on his name or on his profile picture in the message. On his Twitter page, hover your mouse over the “Following” button, which will change to a button "Cancel", and click on it:

There are a few more small buttons that will help you receive messages from this user on a cell phone, etc. You can write your message on Twitter in the form provided for this at the very top of the main page with the inscription "What's happening?". When you start typing a message, you will see the number of characters that can still be typed to the right of the bottom of this form. In, but for this you will always have to have them at hand, because you will not find a built-in tooltip like Vkontakte in this social network.

To reply to an existing Twitter message, simply move your mouse cursor over it and click on the caption that appears at the bottom of the message. "Answer"(in the English version - "Reply").

After that, the name of the user whose message you are going to write a reply to will be automatically added to the response form, and this name will be preceded by an @ sign, which means that this is, in fact, a reply.

Often, messages are read through specialized programs, and not through an Internet browser. There are quite a few such programs. Can send private messages through Twitter that other users will not see. To do this, the addressee must follow you, then you can on his web page, by analogy with the unsubscribe method discussed just above, click on the arrow next to the button resembling the sun, and select from the drop-down list "Direct message username".

Summing up, we can make a generalization and say that Twitter is a service that is an explosive mixture of a blog with ICQ. But it's still not really a blog. It is a means of communication and obtaining information. With it, you can meet interesting people even if you are not added to each other's contact list.

If the person you want is not subscribed to your updates, you can still reply to their messages by simply pasting them into the reply form name with @ in front. As a result, he will notice you and you will be able to finish in any form convenient for you (icq, etc.).

Well, besides this, of course, Twitter can bring visitors to your site in proportion to the number of your followers, if you, for example, set up automatic posting of the titles of your new materials. But about this and that, and setting up posting headlines of new articles from your website there, I will tell the next article.

By the way, Twitter developers recently launched another social project, however, focused on users of mobile gadgets -. It is now rapidly gaining popularity, so I advise you to familiarize yourself with the article at the link in order to, so to speak, keep up with life ...

Good luck to you! See you soon on the blog pages site

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