Twitter Me That

I consider myself to be of at least average intelligence. Or I was, at one point in my life. So why is it so difficult to understand how Twitter works? The main problem I have is remembering who sees my tweets. For some reason, I have trouble keeping straight the few simple rules of tweeting. As I understand them, the rules are:

A tweet from someone else that starts with @YourName will appear in your timeline if you follow the poster (or in your @Mentions tab if you don’t), and in the poster’s timeline, and in the timelines of anyone who follows both the poster and you, and in Search, unless the poster has a protected account, in which case only the poster and the poster’s followers will see it; however, if someone merely includes @YourName in their tweet (for example, their tweet starts with “.@YourName” – note the ‘.’ before the ‘@’), making it a @Mention, their tweet will appear in your timeline if you follow the poster (or in your @Mentions tab if you don’t), and in the poster’s timeline, and in all of the poster’s followers’ timelines, and in Search, UNLESS the tweet was created by pressing the Reply button, in which case only anyone who follows both of you will see it, unless the poster has a protected account, in which case only the poster and the poster’s followers will see it. Conversely, a tweet from you that starts with @AnotherName will be visible in your timeline and to the person you direct the tweet to (in their @Mentions tab) and anyone who follows both you and the person you’re tweeting to (in their timeline) and in Search, unless you have a protected account, in which case the person you’re tweeting it to will only see it if they are following you; however, a tweet from you that merely includes @AnotherName (for example, your tweet starts with “.@AnotherName” – again, note the ‘.’ before the ‘@’), making it a @Mention, will be visible to you, and to the person mentioned in the tweet, and your followers including those who don’t follow @AnotherName (in their timelines) and in Search UNLESS the tweet was created by pressing the Reply button, in which case only anyone who follows both of you will see it. As for direct messages: A direct message from someone to you will appear in your @Messages tab as well as the @Messages tab of the sender and NOT appear in Search; however, they can only send you a direct message if you are following them. Conversely, a direct message from you to someone else will appear in your @Messages tab, and in the @Messages tab of the person you sent it to and NOT appear in Search; however, you can only send someone a direct message if they are following you.

Just to be clear, a ‘.’ (or anything else) in front of a @Reply turns it into a @Mention. So, “@VirtualWayne your tweet mystifies me” could be a reply to my tweet, but a reply like “I’m mystified by your tweet, @VirtualWayne” is a @Mention. And as I wrote earlier, a @Reply is seen only by those who follow both you and the person you replied to, while a @Mention is seen by all your followers (in their timelines). Obviously, when I tweet a @Reply, it’s a public tweet and anyone can see it in my timeline or in the timeline of the person I send it to.

There are other subtleties. For example, the metadata for a @Mention is slightly different from the metadata for a @Reply, and this affects such things as the ability to follow a conversation backward in time to its beginning.

There are two problems here. I’m not really sure about anything I just wrote (see paragraph one). And once in a while Twitter changes the rules.