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CHAPTER 20: Social Media and Skype
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The # (hash) symbol became the common marker for these tags, so the hashtag was
born. Sometimes conventions or advertising campaigns mention a particular hashtag,
and sometimes the hashtag is spontaneous and viral.
URL Shorteners
You’ve only got 140 characters, so you don’t have room for long URLs. A new class of
service emerged that would simply forward links from a shorter URL to a longer one.
URL shorteners themselves became shorter to save space, so services like
TinyURL.com ended up competing with services like b it.ly and ow.ly. Many of these
services also added value, such as metrics for the shortened URLs.
NOTE: You should avoid using shortened URLs when they’re not necessary. You are relying on a
third party to forward your link when you use a shortened URL. That third party could go out of
business or have an outage at any time, making you look unprofessional for having a broken link.
In fact, this is exactly what happened to the tr.im shortening service. In April of 2010, the
company announced it was going out of the URL shortening business and that it was ceasing all
forwards at the end of 2010. Some URLs are also “nicer” than others when it comes to
forwarding your links in a way that search engines can easily crawl.
TwitPic
TwitPic was created by Noah Everett to solve the problem of photo sharing on Twitter.
It’s a separate service, but interconnected. You must register for a TwitPic account at
http://twitpic.com, but your Twitter username is your TwitPic username, and each
photo has its own comment thread on TwitPic. Many phone Twitter apps tie into TwitPic
or use similar services, so uploading and linking a photo is a quick process that can be
accomplished entirely from your phone.
Your DROID doesn’t support directly uploading photos to Twitter from the Social
Networking app at this time, so you’ll need to use a service like TwitPic or a Twitter
client that supports such a feature to attach pictures to your updates.
Direct Messages
Direct messages – or DMs – are short, private messages you can send to a follower that
is also following you. They’re almost like email message, but you’re still constrained to
140 characters. You can send a direct message using a button for that specific purpose.
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