Free Twitter for Dummies by Laura Fitton, Michael Gruen, Leslie Poston

by entering d [username] and then typing your tweet. For example, if you want to send a direct message to our Dummies account ( @dummies ) to ask when the next edition of Twitter For Dummies is coming out, you format the DM as d dummies When’s the next edition coming out?
    Sending DMs is easy. But proceed with caution! Many Twitter users have embarrassing tales of DMs that they accidentally sent as public tweets because they formatted the tweet incorrectly or sent it from the Twitter Home screen instead of from the user’s Profile page (best bet) or the Direct Messages page. Double-check, just to be sure.
    Playing (Twitter) Favorites
    One of the icons that appears when you hover your mouse over a particular tweet is the Favorites star. It’s basically Twitter’s equivalent of a bookmarking tool, and twitterers often overlook it. When you mark a tweet as a favorite, it appears on your Favorites page (see Figure 3-4). You may want to mark a tweet as a favorite to:
    Save it for later.
    Acknowledge that it helped you or that you found it amusing.
    Mark it so that you can reply to it later.
    Remember it so that you can reference it in a blog post or article.
    Save it to quote later.
    Figure 3-4: Your favorite tweets are stored forever.

    Ari Herzog (@ariherzog ) pointed out that favorites are an untapped opportunity to collect testimonials and other tweets that might have value for your company. Innovation software company Brightidea ( @brightidea ) uses it to curate a great collection of Tweets about innovation, drawing upon Twitter search results for keywords related to innovation.
    Our point is, don’t limit yourself to using Favorites only as literal favorites. Use Favorites whichever way works best for you!
    If you start using the Favorites icon on a regular basis, you’ll soon have a large collection of tweets that you can gather data from for various projects or reference when you need to remember a particular joke or comment. You can also use it for bookmarking links so that you can visit it later — many of your best links and referrals will come from your fellow Twitter users.
    One way to find more people on Twitter is to visit the Profile pages of your friends on Twitter and look at their Favorites, to see which tweets they liked the most. If your best friend marked a particular tweet as a favorite, and you’re not yet following the person who posted that tweet, you may want to start following that person.
    Searching favorite tweets
    At the time we write this book, Twitter doesn’t yet offer a way to search within your list of favorite tweets and hasn’t announced any plans to do so. While your list grows, you may want to find some way to catalog your tweets. Some people use a spreadsheet in a desktop program such as Microsoft Excel or a Web-based one such as Google Docs. Some keep a record of their favorite tweets’ permalinks (permanent link URL) pages and tag them by topic, using bookmarking services such as Delicious ( www.delicious.com ) or Diigo ( www.diigo.com ).
    Indexing your favorite tweets takes a bit of hacking:
    1. To get to a tweet’s permalink, find the tweet in your Twitter stream and click the small link below it that shows the time the tweet was sent.
    That link loads the tweet on its very own page, which you can bookmark for later because that page has a standard Web URL that always leads to that specific tweet.
    2. Add that URL to your favorite bookmarking service.
    Follow the directions that your bookmarking service offers for how to add a URL.
    3. If the option is available, tag the link so that you can search by topic later to find it again.
    After you have a system in place for keeping track of tweets that you want to save by using the favorite feature, you can then find them whenever you need them. You can also use the third-party application Tweecious (see Chapter 14) by tweeting the permalink to your favorite tweets and including the word favorites in the tweet where you do