What are all pushed in the 140 words?

Twitter is a thing that is far away from most of us, but the myth of 140 words is heard by many people. However, we can only imagine the charm of these 140 words technically. I recently got a chance to take a detour and study it. It is indeed remarkable.

 

Let's talk about the overall impression. You are familiar with text messages. A text message can contain up to 70 Chinese characters, and the corresponding English character is 140 characters. This may be the first generation of 140 characters long. However, these are actually representations. What is really attractive is what these 140 words actually do? Or what can a user do with 140 words?

When we see the details, we can clearly find that these 140 words are not only 140 bytes of text content, it is actually a powerful descriptive language with a length of 140 bytes, Or, further, it can be called a "programming language ". This time, let's talk about two places: @ username and # Emacs.

** @ Username

@ Username is a Twitter ID. However, placing this ID at the beginning of tweet can constitute a reply to this user. Although Twitter provides the reply function for the convenience of the general public on the webpage interface, both the font and the position are very inconspicuous. The reason is clearly that the simplest way to communicate is to directly shout, "James! Everything you want is ready ." The simplest user interface clearly means that this sentence can be called out directly. Any redundant steps are cumbersome.

 

Furthermore, this simple logic and UI lay the foundation for cross-platform, cross-device, and even cross-media Twitter applications.

 

Of course, this is not the only way to use @ username. When this @ username string appears elsewhere in the tweet, it can also constitute a"Mentioned". We often mention other people in our daily communication process. In face-to-face communication, if the third person was not present at the time, Ta would not be able to know that he was mentioned. Unless it is an exchange between a Party and TA. Twitter's "mentions" feature solves this problem. It is quite simple to use. You only need to write the TA name in the Tweet as the @ username of the TA, and then the so-called TA will be mentioned by yourself (@ mentions) I can see my own tweet. Of course, don't write @ username when talking about others. Just remove. :-)

** # Emacs

Next let's talk about # Emacs. This is a tag. In Twitter, it is called hashtags. No matter what it is, the role of tags in Web 2.0 is no longer familiar to anyone. What's amazing is the usage of hashtags in tweet. There is no place specifically used to set hashtags here, and all hashtags are included in the content of these 140 words. Only one English word in tweet is preceded#The word will become a hashtag.

With hashtags, you can click the hashtags word in the tweets to retrieve all the tweets that use the same hashtags. There is no better way to join the community you are interested in.

 

There are only two steps:

• As long as you write a hashtags file, your content has already entered the community defined by hashtags.
• As long as you click a hashtags, you can directly retrieve the content of the community defined by this hashtags.

To celebrate, there is nothing simpler than this. For the first time I used Twitter in my life, all I had to do was to write a tweet about # Emacs!

 

All these things are technically nothing new, but they are enough for us to think more when designing user interfaces or user interactions.