The Coffee Desk

Questions For Twitter

I love Twitter. I visit the site from a variety of applications, and probably during 85% of my day. It’s becoming a bit of a disease for me, but I still can’t get enough and have sort of generated my own set of burning, unanswered questions for the Twitter developers, listed below. They aren’t meant to be serious, but I still wonder.

If I name my account ‘home’ or ‘account’, do I instantly get followed by every Twitter user?

I should try this. If not followed, then at least have everyone land on my page when trying to view friends’ timelines or change settings.

Do those celebrities really tweet that much?

…or are those just the imaginations of some of the most lonely PR people I’ve ever seen/followed?

Can I make my own command?

@replies work, but #tags and ^cotags don’t do much of anything. So I, Mark (last name kept off the Internet) am now creating my own command: %. The % command doesn’t do anything either, you just mark %random words with it in your tweets to force people to ask you what it is, so you can tell them “what? You don’t %know about the %Mark command?”.

Spread my new command as soon as possible. Hell, if Stephen Colbert can name everything after himself, can I have at least one character on one website?

Why won’t you follow me?

I hate it when I follow somebody, and they never follow me back. It’s just rude, in my opinion. So I want to reserve the right to slap them from across the Internet when they don’t follow me within several days of me following them. Don’t ask how to do it, I just want it done. I mean, Myspace and Facebook allow two-way friendships, and Twitter even has that ‘block’ button, so what gives?

Spam, or just outgoing people?

Related to the above question, who are all these people following me I didn’t ask for? It’s creepy, but at least I can block them. You know who you are!

If I submit my Twitter RSS feed to a feed-to-tweet service, will the world end?

Every Twitter account (including the public timeline) has an RSS feed of every tweet. Well, there are also RSS-to-Twitter services out there that read these and submit the entries as tweets automatically. So if I submit said feed to said service, will I get a knock at my door later?

Last thing: what came first, the Slashdot user or the site?

There is a notorious user(s) on the website slashdot.org that goes by the name of Twitter, and has multiple “sockpuppet” accounts for gypping the modding system. That user is pretty old, and Twitter is relatively new, so I have to ask: which came first? I want too say Twitter.com came first, but I still have to wonder…

Some of these questions have answers, others almost certainly don’t. But one thing is still for certain: I still love twitter. Any site that lets me tweet while I poop what I read on my Reddit as a result of my Google (or Bing) is a good service to mankind.

And with that, I leave you the ideal tweet:

@twitter @cotags I just %arrived to the #E3 show today, hope %to see some #upcominghalostuff. ^Mark http://bit.ly/Q2lim

(UPDATE from Anthony: you would not believe the horrendous spelling/grammar this post had before I edited it. If you think he was drunk when he posted this, you aren’t alone XD )