@repliesOne thing I didn’t understand about Twitter that I learned from The Twitter Book is that most people won’t see typical @replies. To see them, one must be following both people having the given conversation.

This misunderstanding has kinda wrecked how I choose to follow people. After being bombarded by some ridiculously verbose conversations when I first started using Twitter, I’ve been choosing not to follow people who, when I’m checking out their profiles, use Twitter to converse with lots of people. Knowing that I’m spared of these conversations has changed my outlook on who to follow.

It’s also changed how I intend on having conversations. Until this point, if I’ve had something to say to someone, I’ve been DMing them. Knowing that I won’t be spamming the people I’m following, I’m less hesitant to give them a shout using an @reply. Eeep… now that I think of it, these replies are still probably going to be piped into Facebook. Considering this, this sounds like a good place to insert a Yahoo Pipe! Using a pipe, I can create a feed that is stripped of messages starting with “@,” then is dumped into Facebook.

I’ve found the book to be fairly useful. I was already familiar with a lot of the points it made, but in addition to the @replies revelation, it’s turned me onto at least a couple third party tools I wasn’t aware of. Going forward, when people looking to get into it ask me about Twitter, I’m just going to forward them to the book. It should serve as a great primer.