Useful posts about Twitter - a collection

Most people visit this blog after using a search engine to find out information about something related to Twitter (most popular search results relate to "stopping people seeing your tweets") so I thought I'd collect together some of these posts here.

1. Blocking users and protecting accounts - what does it do? 
• What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you? 7 June 2012
My most popular post, by far. Oddly I just pinged it out after realising that an awful lot of people don't understand how little blocking someone on Twitter 'protects' them.

• Easy ways to see the tweets of someone who's blocked you on Twitter 8 October 2012
It's even easier these days since Twitter no longer even makes any attempt at hiding the tweets of someone who's blocked you.

• Don't assume that your private Twitter account is all that private 7 December 2012
Don't rely too heavily on the protection afforded by protecting your account. It largely stops your tweets from being seen (unless someone copies and pastes) but does nothing to stop people from making sense of revealing information that is sent to you in response to your tweets.

2. How to stop pictures from autopreviewing in the web version of Twitter
• Twitter's new photo preview just takes up more space - here's one partial solution 30 October 2013
Actually there are a few suggestions as other ideas came in after publication. I think the simplest is to download a plugin for Chrome and tweak its settings (link to instructions in that post).

3. Mangled links, eg in DMs
• How to send and receive web addresses via Twitter DM - break the URL - an imperfect fix 25 October 2013
Twitter's stopped people sending links via DM - the trick is to break the link so that Twitter doesn't recognise it as an URL. It's the difference between http://www.google .co.uk and http://www.google.co.uk.

• If you use Echofon watch out for it mangling your tweets & shared URLs - blame the tmi shortener 12 October 2013
This is a quirk of Echofon on iPhone / iPad which automatically converts overlong tweets into truncated ones and uses TMI.me to shorten them. This has the effect of making any link included in the original tweet unclickable. Easily fixed in Echofon's settings, instructing it not to use tmi.me.

4. How to find information or use Twitter search for different purposes 
• How to remember who tweeted that article when you want to give them credit later 19 September 2013
You can search for a link on Twitter and see who's tweeted it. An obvious follow-on from this is being able to see who's talking about your organisation by searching for your organisation's homepage.

• How often has that tweet been retweeted? Here are some ways to find out 12 May 2013
Several suggestions including on-site at Twitter and off-site at Topsy and Favstar.

5. If someone's being annoying on Twitter
• How to trap tweets in a hurry 30 July 2013
If someone's misbehaving here are some ways to take screenshots and other copies of their tweets in case they delete them.

• Thwarting spammers on hashtag livetweeted events 22 March 2013
A simple search string added to a hashtag helps to remove the worst of spammers hijacking the tagged conversation.