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Twitter 101: Tips and Tricks



How do I get on Twitter?


Today, there are more ways to access Twitter than there are characters in the average tweet. Most obviously, the site can be accessed via the Twitter.com Web site, which has a place for you to easily add your updates in a field at the top of a page, as well as a central feed of all the tweets by your friends and followees. There's also a place for you to see who is following you and who you are following, a place to set up a profile, and a bank of settings (where you can set up forwarding to your cell phone, for example, so you can receive the latest tweets from anyone you choose via text message).

In addition to the main site, plenty of Web and desktop apps help recreate the Twitter experience with added features not found on Twitter.com. Tweetree, for example, previews YouTube links and images inside tweets, while Twhirl and Tweetdeck are optimized for photo uploading. Tweetdeck even helps you search and filter by topic within Twitter, which is handy if you follow more than 200 people. Mobile apps such as TwitterFon, Tweetie, and Twitterific let you read and send updates right from your phone with added features that can tell your geographical location (using your phone's built-in GPS) and allow instant image uploading.

There's even an app that integrates with Facebook. The Twitter Facebook application simply mirrors your Twitter updates on Facebook. In other words, update something on Twitter, and it's automatically on your Facebook page as a status update.

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