They’ve inspired me to make significant changes in my life – negotiating the salary for my first “real job”, challenging contracts and business practices that I didn’t think were fair, and generally making my life way more awesome by asking for – and nearly always getting – what I want.

Yesterday, for example, I sent a note about the MOO cards I ordered to their support desk asking for a replacement set of cards because they had misprinted mine.  It was a small issue, and they offered me a half-off coupon, but I insisted that they send me a whole deck – and guess what, they did.  Kudos to them for solving the issue, and to me for asking, and then asking again.

I’ve created a Twitter account called @askdaily, inspired by these books and this particular incident, to share this kind of “happy negotiation moments” – mine was little, but I’d love to retweet people’s (particularly womens’) successes with job negotiations and promitions, contracts, car repairs, sales negotiations, housework splitting, whatever the happy moments that people get from asking for what they want out of life.

-Leigh

While some people are very frustrated by the occasional spamminess of Twitter -> Facebook posting, and others posit that Facebook will eventually kill Twitter because the “conversation moves there”, I just like being able to update both places at once and don’t really care to make predictions either way.

Instead I want to post a quick field guide to Twitter for Facebook users.  Not because they should particularly go ahead and sign up, but to make clearer what all the @this and #that’s crapping up their news feeds are.  Because they do tend to open dialogs and conversations, but can be confusing sometimes too – I definitely think about how something will work on my FB feed before posting to Twitter.

The basics

• #hashtags are probably the least intuitive thing for non-Twitter-users.  They are basically keywords which Twitter users track threads on Twitter Search.  Twitter used to have a “track” feature which made following them way less of a pain, but it got killed when they had uptime and reliability issues last spring; the tools adapted, and now some have built in search.
• Mentions of @people by their @nickname.  Facebook doesn’t link these @names to the appropriate profile, but if you want to see who the heck @hypatiadotca is, just go to http://twitter.com/hypatiadotca .  People at least usually have pictures, if not their real names, on their Twitter profiles which helps sort out name->nick mapping issues :)
• Retweets, or RT, are just reposts from another user’s feed.  These are somewhat like the ping or trackbacks of the blogging world.  There’s no standard syntax for these though RT seems to be preferred for sheer concision.

The annoyances

• tw-words: tweets, tweeple, twits, twitterati… the only ones anyone really uses are “tweet” to describe a message on Twitter, and twits to describe users.  The latter is hilarious, all the other portmanteaus are just irritating.  If you actually want to know, there’s a list of what they all mean, supposedly.
• @replies: Facebook users, in theory, when the Twitter/Facebook app is working correctly, shouldn’t see these as they are filtered.  Twitter conversations flow weirdly enough on the site itself or clients, let alone Facebook where one side may not be cross-posting their feed.  The app occasionally misbehaves, however, and I’m sorry for all the times I’ve crapped up your feed with @replies.
• lack of @username linking: I really wish either FB or Twitter would just do something like “if app posting to status == Twitter, replace all @username references with a link to twitter.com/username”.  Sigh.  A corollary to this is that unless users have added the Twitter app box to their Boxes page, there’s no way to find out what their Twitter username is.  Grump.
• overall volume: yes, some twits are spammy.  There’s even a measure for it, the “scoble“, which is how annoying a person is compared to Robert Scoble who tweets approximately a hojillion times per hour.  Consider turning down spammy users in Facebook’s settings via the “see less from this user” option.

I’ll of course be posting this on Twitter, which posts to my Facebook, and would be interested in any other weird “gotchas” that Facebook users have experienced.

-Leigh

• twhirl – doesn’t stop scrolling up when it’s out of focus
• twibble – random crappiness, memory leaks, poor recovery from posting failures
• tweetdeck – doesn’t remember the groups you set up so if you accidentally close them you’re screwed, and also doesn’t work on 64-bit linux (same applies to twhirl – it’s an Adobe Air issue)
• a couple of console clients, all just sort of generally crap.  Mainly frustrated by their inability to scroll backwards – I like being able to not look at twitter for a few hours without missing out on stuff :)

So here’s my ideal client.  I’m going to start writing it on Wednesday, once school’s done.

• works with an irc client.  I <3 irc, and I can keep it running on my shell server, accessible from anywhere.
• search functionality: I want to be able to join a channel and have that act as the search term on summize / twitter search such that /join #search-25C3 shows me the results for this search in real(ish) time.
• groups functionality (like tweetdeck) – I’d like to be able to set up groups of followees to see only their tweets.  There are a couple of reasons for this: wanting to have a “quiet” group containing just the people I care most about, avoiding what on LiveJournal is termed “unfriending drama”, grouping friends geographically, or whatever.  But it’s been sorely lacking in my Twitter experience so far.
• keyword exclusion – if I don’t want to hear any more about #AnnoyingVendorCon, I want to be able to exclude it from the tweets I’m getting.
• proper IRC direct message functionality: dm’s should show up as /msg windows.
• following and unfollowing from within the client – this hasn’t worked properly in twibble for a while.

I’m going to start working off Mike Verdone’s existing Python Twitter Tools – should be a good start.