Twitter For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8

Improving Your Twitteracy

In This Chapter

Using tools to enrich your Twitter experience

Understanding the infamous hashtag

Finding programs that make using Twitter easy

Twitter is a useful tool on its own, but by design, it remains extremely simple, even stark, in its functionality. The folks who created it wanted to make Twitter a platform for users to build on, improve, and enhance, so they opened Twitter’s API (application programming interface, or code) to the public. As a result, enterprising and creative software developers can create applications that work with Twitter to offer even more compelling features and ways to use the dynamic system.

Twitter itself is constantly evolving and changing — from design facelifts to new features to changes in how the back-end technology works. The Twitter team pays close attention to how people interact with the system and what those users want to do with it. Because the long-term success of Twitter depends completely on a healthy base of users generating a regular stream of content, management obviously wants to do its best to keep Twitter on its toes.

As a result, Twitter is a living application and community, extending far ...