List of Twitter Commands
During the last months, Twitter became a fixed part of my online activities. It's a convenient way to stay in contact with people around the world.
There are multiple ways to twitter. You can use your mobile phone, a dedicated desktop client or a browser extension. The one that makes most sense to me is using their Jabber gateway1).
Whatever your favorite way of twittering is, there may be one feature you are not aware of yet: controlling Twitter through command tweets. That's right. Instead of visiting their website to follow someone or check a user's bio, you can just message Twitter.
Here is a list of commands I found so far - not all of them are documented at the official twitter lingo site.
| follow user | Follow a user's tweets - you will receive all her updates. |
|---|---|
| leave user | Stop updates from the user (but leave her in your friend list). |
| delete user | Drop the user from your friend list. |
| invite email/number | Send a twitter invite to a friend's mail or phone. |
| whois user | Ask Twitter to return a quick info about the given user. |
| off | Turn off all messages to you. Sending it twice will even silence direct messages. |
| on | Will turn the messages on again. |
| d user message | Send the message as a private message to the given user. This message will not appear in any public time line and is usually delivered via email, too. |
| track term | Subscribe to tweets containing term regardless who posted it. You don't need to follow anyone to get those notices. |
| untrack term | Stop the tracking of a term and get no longer messages about it. |
| untrack all | Delete your whole list of tracked terms. |
| track | Ask twitter to return a list of all currently tracked terms. |
| stats | Ask for some basic statistics like number of followers and your track list. |
Be sure to start the command at the very beginning of your tweet - a leading whitespace might cause it to end up on your time line.
I especially like the tracking feature. I track a few terms I'm currently interested in2) to see what people around the world are talking about them. It's also a great way to discover new, interesting people to follow at Twitter.
Do you know of other useful commands I haven't listed? What's your favorite use of Twitter?