Our Guide to Twitter's Language - 0 views
-
Kristen Olsen on 17 Sep 12"The beauty and challenge of Twitter is stuffing your most sophisticated thoughts and feelings into a measly 140 characters (or less). Unfortunately, our traditional methods of communication have proven to be a poor training ground for micro-messaging, and even the most savvy platform users have sighed in exasperation as those bright red negative character signs mock our basic intelligence. But, perhaps even worse, no good tweet is ever going to be 140 characters because it's impossible to share, respond or reference a tweet that's already at it's max. If you want to make a big statement with a small message, you have to trim the fat. Thankfully, a special subset of finite abbreviations and techniques have cropped up to help optimize your own Twitter lingo. These handy snippets of language - some no more than a single symbol - have been instrumental in fostering more sophisticated sharing and discourse simply because they are small. Plus, there's an odd satisfaction one gets from distilling a five-word sentence into a five-character word. It's rather intoxicating. Unfortunately, these phrases are also often just gibberish to the uninformed eye, making it horribly confusing to parse through the information that quickly floats by in the news stream. This is why The Next Web has developed this quick and handy guide to Twitter's most stalwart phrases. From the basic beginner to a tweet-savvy expert, this cheat sheet will help you navigate the perplexing and concentrated language that often appears in the stream, and make you seem like a regular pro in no time. Beginner's Lingo @ - The @ symbol is easily the most important thing on Twitter, because without it, you will never be able to communicate. In tweets, @ is the necessary marker for the system to recognize when you're talking to someone and therefore alert them of the mention. Plus, it can even pare down the character count from the get go: it's much easier (and shorter) to refer to Unit
