electronic brain surgery since 2001

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?

Tags:: twitter

Similar posts:

¹⁾ I just wish it would be more reliable

²⁾ eg. “DokuWiki”, “Geocaching” or “Android”

Posted on Tuesday January the 22nd, 2008 (6 months ago).

Comments

Coole Zusammenstellung, danke!

2008-01-22 21:50:54

lutzland

thanks for this, will try track command.

2008-01-22 23:50:02

faizal

I only knew the "d" command, I'm probing "track" atm. Thanks.

2008-01-23 10:39:02

r0sk

The track one is definitely the favourite! Mine too. Thanks for putting this list together.

2008-01-23 11:35:31

Sean McGoldrick

I like this list of commands. I'm currently using Google Talk with twitter which has made the use of the site that much better. I have about 5 items i'm currently tracking on twitter which has made following new people interesting. Even got me featured in a blog post over on ProBlogger

2008-01-23 13:53:33

Sam MacDonald

Nice! I've been looking for something like this for a while. Thanks for the information

2008-01-24 00:15:17

Jim Goldstein

Thanks for this! To save someone else time, though, I'd like to note that "track" works only with phone or IM - no web or API -- "yet" they say at http://help.twitter.com/index. … &id=75

2008-02-20 05:00:13

Nancy

There's also the 'delete' command so you can delete your account (why?!) send 'delete' and it asks you to confirm.

2008-02-22 15:33:13

Azhar

I tried the delete user command (replacing user with someone I'm following), but it didn't work. All it does is send an update that says delete user. Too bad, because that's the command I want most of all!

2008-06-12 05:33:46

tom johnson