Zbig's dashboard

When i first found out about tracking, i thought this was how it worked. So i set it up and went to sleep. The next morning i woke with 25 messages from people i didn't know. Which was of no use to me.

I agree that there can be a lot more documentation. 8-)

To be fair, I've also noticed that while the Twitter FAQ isn't updated often or quickly, they *do* eventually get around to adding new pages when different people ask the same questions here in this help forum.

For example, the FAQ page for troubleshooting your phone setup wasn't there when I first visited the FAQ many months ago.

Still, I agree that it will save a lot of people a lot of trouble if the FAQ were more visible and more comprehensive.

Thanks mdy for doing some of the leg work for me.
Usually, I try not to discover how things work by trial-and-error. The danger is that things may work in a certain way not because they were intended to work that way but because there is a bug etc.
However, the lack of a comprehensive help section is a huge shortcoming. The Twitter home page should have a big, bright button labeled "Twitter tutorial" containing a narrative of how to interact with Twitter and what to expect at each step. For example, the process of registering one's cell phone to start following someone is sorely missing. I had to go through it several times in order to gather enough information to put together a little 'cheat sheet' that I then distributed to the people to whom our organization is promoting the Twitter service as a means of delivering urgent and important, time-sensitive news bulletins.

I understand, however, what's at play. The company running Twitter is made up mostly of software engineers/programmers etc. who are typically loathe to write manuals and user guides (I speak from experience although I have been able to control my 'loathing' and I take great pride in writing manuals and guides from my intended user's perspective, which is someone who is not familiar with the intricacies of the application and all its bells and whistles and who does not assume anything) I usually divide my guides into three sections:
1. this is what this system is intended to do
2. this is how it interacts with other systems that you may be familiar with
3. this is what will happen as you go about using it
In other words, he things that I expect to know before I start using something that I'm not familiar with.

All,

Interesting that @ZBig brought up Twitter similar to a restaurant. I'm sure I'm not the first (or @ZBig). And others probably have other similar/interesting analogies to what Twitter is.

I don't usually pimp my own blog, but back in Dec 2007, I wrote a "Twitter 101" which tries to describe Twitter to newbies as having dinner with friends :-)

Anyways, a little off-topic (which was tracking), but thought I'd share :-)

Interesting idea: to give a choice to track within friends and within public. I think that Twitter is, so far, quite focused on as much as possible being made public. But, perhaps that could change as the service gets built out. I know I love the track feature for spotting public things I'm interested in, but I so far haven't needed to track in the way you mention.

It's funny, too, that everyone has their own idea -- or metaphor -- for how they think of Twitter. Yours as a restaurant with microphones makes for an interesting mental picture!

I came up with my own Twitter "tagline": "Twitter: The most interesting people you may never meet."

I don't think Twitter needs to do any marketing. Just harness those users to do it for them!

Re: Dashes
I tried sending 'track braves-senior-team' and Twitter's reply was:

You'll now receive updates matching 'bravesseniorteam braves senior team'. To stop, send 'untrack bravesseniorteam braves senior team'.

... which I think isn't exactly the response that you had hoped to get.

And, I forgot to add that yes, Blocks are currently not respected in Track, but that is something that will be remedied (hopefully) soon, based on a recent statement from Twitter (1 day ago).

Hi there. I don't have an answer to all your questions, but I *do* know the following (from experimentation):

1. Track ignores 'stop words,' for example: to, the, a, with.

Note: the list that I linked to above is not the actual list that Twitter uses (I don't know what their list is, unfortunately), but that list should give you a good idea of what is likely to be ignored.

The filtering of stop words implies that we can't successfully track phrases like 'Note to self' since 'to' is a stop word and gets filtered out.

2. Track appears to use space to identify the end of words and only tracks entire words.

For example, if you had sent 'track earthquake m." (with the period), track will not send you tweets that contains 'track earthquake m.3'

3. Track ignores the @ symbol.

Thus, if you intend to track your username in order to receive @replies sent to you, then Track strips away the @ symbol and only tracks the text that follows.

It's possible that Track also strips away other non-text characters, but I don't know this for sure.

4. Track works with multi-word phrases provided there are no stop words and provided you sent the phrase without quotes.

For example, it works as expected when you send 'track lead generation' -- it only sends you tweets that contain 'lead generation' as a phrase. Words that contain only lead or only generation are not returned.

I don't believe (but am not absolutely sure) that Track returns tweets that have both those words separated by other words.

However, if you had sent 'track "lead generation"' (with the double quotes) -- track doesn't work as expected because it thinks the quotes should be part of what's tracked.

Tip: You can always try sending the Track command to see how Twitter interprets the text.

For example, if you had sent 'track note to self', Twitter's reply is: You'll now receive updates matching 'note self'. To stop, send 'untrack note self'. That gives you confirmation that the word 'to' was ignored.

A final note -- I believe there are plans to enhance the Track feature soon, so the behavior described above may no longer be valid after those enhancements are added.

Apologies. I'm out of here! So much for trying to be helpful.....

ThomasHan, that's not what I wanted to hear because it goes against the whole concept of Twitter which is answering the question "What are you doing?"
I'm not interested in what someone in the UK that I have never even imagined existed is doing. If that person just by sheer luck happens to use in the content of his own update a word that I am tracking then I will receive it as a completely spurious notification. I imagined Twitter to be like a large restaurant. There are people sitting around many tables eating and carrying on a discussion. Some tables are large, some are small. I'm with my group of people and I'm interested in our table's discussion. The tracking function is like setting up a microphone under all the other tables and listening in on their conversations. Plus, the people at the other tables KNOW that there is microphone under their table which means that they will either limit their conversation to trivial things or they will intentionally say something to provoke a reaction. Hopefully, for the time being I will be able to get around this undesired feature by using tracking expressions that are very unique.

The obvious improvement would be to build in the possibility of using one or other of the options, i.e. a search within friends or a general search. Perhaps there is a way of doing this involving a logical "AND" ...

hi @Zbig,

Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on what you want). It is the latter. By using 'track', you'll get notification from ALL tweets, not just the people you follow.

People can view updates from public Twitter accounts without having to register for a Twitter account if:

1. They visit individual Twitter profile pages
For example, you can view all updates posted by @twitter_status at http://twitter.com/twitter_status whether or not you're a Twitter user.

You can verify this for yourself by logging out of Twitter then going to that URL. You'll see that the updates posted by @twitter_status are visible even to people without Twitter accounts.

2. They use an RSS reader
Each public Twitter account has a corresponding RSS feed, which is available at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time... (replace 'username' with the actual Twitter user name).

For example, @twitter_status has an RSS feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time...

Anyone with an RSS reader can subscribe to that RSS feed without having to register with Twitter.

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Obviously, folks who want to receive Twitter updates on their phone or im will have to register with Twitter to provide their phone numbers and im account names.

Similarly, if you intend to follow a lot of people and would like to view their tweets on the Twitter website, you will need to have a Twitter account and tell Twitter explicitly which people you'd like to follow.

The lack of tech support from Twitter is becoming more and more disturbing. It leads me to believe that the true nature of Twitter as an over-hyped, niche-market, barely significant flash-in-the-pan is finally becoming visible.