There are a lot of odd acronyms floating around Twitter. Apart from urban slang, and weird Web 2.0 website names (i.e. Squidoo, Kirtsy), there are “hashtags.”

A hashtag is a word or set of words with a “#” in front of it. This was originally designed so that when you are looking for a specific topic on the Twitter search engine ,  it was possible to find quickly. An example of this is the place name “San Diego”. If you look it up without a hashtag, you get everything with those keywords including source material (names of publications) showing up. With the # in front, #sandiego, you can get the exact subject you are looking for.

Of course, this assumes that everyone on Twitter remembers to use the hashtag. Many do not, and others make up their own hashtags as they are writing their tweets. So, in order to figure out what peeps are talking about, I recommend using the site What The Hashtag? .

This website gives you the trending hashtags, active tags, and a word cloud of tag categories. It is free to create an account, and they now have a set of tools that can help you figure out the odder tags.

There are also a lot of chatspeak acronyms that show up in Twitter. Many of these were originally used in chatrooms, and then in text messages  (SMS) on mobile phones.

I would also recommend the Twittonary as a place to look up Twitter words.

If you are following more than 100 people on Twitter, you know how hard it is to keep track of who said what. The best application I have found for this is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR application (which means you have to download the AIR software onto your computer) that lets you see in table form at least 3 columns. The default columns are “Friends”, “Replies”, and “Direct Messages.”  You can build your own column  as a Group (the tab is at the top of the application). Fo example, my Group are the followers I am most interested in. I named the Group, and then selected the Twitter names that I wanted in the group. The program does the rest.

You can also change the colors of the application.

I highly recommend this desktop app for keeping up on what is happening day to day on Twitter.

2Tweet allows you to send photos and videos to your Twitter, but t is not as simple as it sounds.  You email their server with your data and the first 113 characters of the subject become your tweet. The body of your text is put into the photo viewer. Then a tweet with a link to the pics shows up.

You can see the the number of visitors and ratings and comments on the link. 2Tweet creates a gallery of your pics on their server.  This app is good if you like to post a lot of photos and you want to keep track of them online.  – Louisanna6

Image via Wikipedia

ChirpCity allows you to see who is tweeting from and about your city. It also shows a top user list for each city. The cities are arranged in alphabetical order and covers the U.S. and Canada. There is also a Firefox and IE7 browser plugin. ChirpCity is from Roberto Martinez and you can follow him @chirpcity .

When you post a note on Twitter, it is called a “Tweet.” The Tweet or post can only be 140 characters, which is why Twitter is referred to as micro-blogging.

People on Twitter are known by the “@” symbol and whatever they call themselves.  If you are curious about someone, you can click on their name and see their profile.

If you feel overwhelmed by the number of Tweets coming at you, you can make some of them Favorites and come back to them later. On the Twitter website, you will see a star in the upper right hand corner of the post. If you click on that, the star turns yellow. You have now made that post a Favorite. To access these posts on the website, look on the right side of the page and you will see a link labeled “Favorites.” Click on that, and it will bring up a list of the Tweets you starred. When you are done reading a tweet, merely click on the star again and it and the note fades away.

If you are using TweetDeck (and I will be doing a review of this application later), you can mouse over the avatar (photo or drawing of the person) and you will see a heart. That is also for making a favorite out of a Tweet. When you click on the heart, the dot next to the person’s name disappears.