What is Twitter? It’s a social network with a microblogging service that allows users to send and read text microentries below 140 characters long called “tweets.”These messages can be sent over Twitter’s web site, SMS (short message service) from a mobile phone, instant messaging programs or even third party applications such as Twidroid, Twitterrific, Tweetie, Facebook, Twinkle, Tweetboard or TweetDeck.
These updates are displayed on the user profile page, and they are also instantly sent to other users (called “followers”) that have chosen to receive them.These users can be restricted to sending their messages only to their contacts or access by all users can be allowed, which is the default setting.
Users may receive updates from Twitter’s site, via instant messaging, SMS, RSS and email.
About hashtags and other Twitter symbols
Short messages on Twitter can be tagged by including one or more hashtags: predefined words or phrases with the hash symbol (#) and with multiple linked words, for instance, “#XXGX V - VIII GeneXus Meetings :: The meetings through time :: Years 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1997 http://goo.gl/AfTN”. This way, a user may search for #XXGX and this tagged word will be displayed in the search results. These hashtags also appear in a number of topic web sites, including Twitter’s main page. Hashtags on Twitter serve to generate conversations rather than to organize contents. They invite users to participate in a discussion with several people instead of tagging content for later retrieval.
Among other uses, by means of an application they also enable the participation of tweets with hashtags in a web site. This is the case when using the hashtag #XXGX for tweets referring to the XX GeneXus Meeting, which will be displayed on the Meeting’s home page.
Do you have a Twitter account? Use the hashtag #XXGX when you tweet about the GeneXusMeeting and your message will be displayed in Real – Time Conversation at www.genexus.com/meeting. To reply to a tweet you just need to type "@username" at the beginning of your message. It is also used for mentioning an information source. Example: @arminbachmann Hard to personally welcome everyone at #XXGX. There are over 1,300 registered participants.
