Month: September 2010

Uncommon Knowledge: Twitter @replies

I’ve been thinking lately, and I’m going to start a new series here on the blog, tentatively titled stuff I know and take for granted, but it’s stuff that a lot of people don’t know, you guys!

I may need to think of a better title.

I won’t, however, let that stop me.1 These are things that the world may or may not need to know, but should certainly have the chance to know.

Here’s my first one:

If you have a common name on Twitter, you probably get lots of errant ‘@replies’ because people don’t know how to use them.

A little background: if you use Twitter—and I won’t fault you if you don’t2—you’re probably aware that you can direct your post to another user by placing their unique Twitter user ID after an @ sign somewhere in your post. For example, if you wanted to tell me I’m great, you’d say something like:

I think that @everett is great!!

(@nobody Hey, thanks!)

…and then my Twitter software client would alert me that someone directed a post my way. These are usually called “replies” or “mentions” depending on the client you use. Simple stuff, right?

Note that it just so happens that my Twitter ID is “everett.” This is so because I registered my account in mid-2006, early enough that first-names were still unregistered, and thus, available as user IDs. Because I chose a common name for my ID and quite a few people out there know people named Everett and some of these people don’t know what they’re doing, I often get posts directed at me unintentionally.

I’ve gotten used to it. Here are some examples of places I was ‘mentioned’ by mistake.

Not the worst advice, but I can’t take the credit.

This never happened. Really.

Not sure where I was on the evening of August 19th, but I’m not sure where Elijah’s sense of entitlement comes from either.

This example is interesting. Thanks to Twitter, I’ve learned that there’s a chain of barbecue places in the Oakland area called Everett & Jones, which a lot of people like to go to. Mentions of E&J actually get mistakenly directed at me a lot… and from everything I’ve heard, it makes my must-try list if I’m ever in the Bay Area again. Thanks, Twitter!

  1. You could also say that I need to think of better ideas than this one, but I won’t let that stop me either.[↩]
  2. Despite all the hype, Twitter is totally non-essential, and you’re probably not missing that much if you don’t use it.[↩]

…I just want some snack cakes

I was playing some Scarface: The World Is Yours earlier this evening on my Wii and while the game is in many ways a series of missions that don’t vary all that much, a part of the game that is pretty consistently interesting is talking to random people on the streets. (What does that leave? A pretty standard 3D open world, drive-cars-shoot-people-deal-drugs rush rush affair that happens to take place in a Miami I don’t quite recognize.)

But like I was saying, the conversations.

I can’t remember what purpose this serves in the game, but you can have back-and-forth conversations with the seemingly hundreds of unique NPCs that line the streets of the game. Walk up to one, press A and Tony spits out a line, to which they respond with something that more-or-less makes sense. Press A and Tony replies with something mostly relevant to what they said. Do this back-and-forth exchange a few times and your “Conversation” count increases by one. (You can only converse with any given individual once, at which point talking to them consists of seemingly-random one-liners that seem to either propose sexual relations or bodily harm… or are just strings of Scarface-style expletives.)

So earlier, I (well, Tony) was visiting our local bank branch when I decided to talk to some of the people hanging around in the stairwell. We walked up to one African-American gentleman in an ugly sweater and the conversation basically began like this:

Tony: Miami is full of pussy, meng. You just need to be rich to get it.
Gentleman: Man, I don’t care about pussy. I just want some snack cakes.

I’m gonna let that one hang for a moment.

…

Okay, I fucking love this game.