For some strange reason, Twitter refuses to write a simple primer on how to use their service. It’d be so simple to make it the first page users see once they’ve made a new account, and yet here we are, with millions of people annoying the crap out of me with constant, relentless abuse of such a simple service. I’ve got a few gripes guidelines here that might help to curb some twitter-abuse.

Spam: Take it elsewhere.

If you have some sort of business, whether it’s out in the waking life or online somewhere, you need to understand something: Twitter is not your personal marketing tool. Nobody gives a damn about your product. They might have, had they found it on their own, but you lost any shred of credibility you had as a merchant when you decided to spam them with it. Habitat (the UK furniture company akin to IKEA) learned this the hard way when they douched up the twitter feeds with spam.

While any spam on twitter is unacceptable, there is a worst spam. Piggybacking on words from the Trending Topics list is the absolute worst spamming offense you can commit. Learn from Habitat’s mistake, don’t be that guy.

Following: Reciprocate.

I couldn’t possibly count the number of times I’ve received a DM from someone saying “thanks for the follow,” and yet that person did not follow me back. If you are so into yourself that you’re too special to follow someone back, then you should not DM them, either. If I follow someone and they don’t follow me back, then they’ll be deleted off my lists within the week. Even better are the people who thank you for the follow, then proceed to ask you a question. If you are not following somebody, they cannot respond to your DM’s.

Another great one is the “I’m so special I feel the need to interrogate people who follow me” guy. Don’t be this guy. If someone follows you, it’s not because you’re special, it’s because twitter is an open network. Your profile probably has data that flags you in some way when people are looking to grow their feeds. They use keywords. So lighten up already.

And please, turn off your auto-DM’s. It’s incredibly annoying.

On Retweets:

This is how most people’s retweets look to me:

Yo @Dawg, I herd u like retweets so I put a retweet in yo tweet so you can retweet while you retweet.

If your retweets look like this, with so many RT’s scattered through it that reading the message has become difficult, you’re doing it wrong. Once a tweet has gone through two or three RT’s, you’re safe to start chopping some of them off of it. Use your discretion to figure out who should get attribution for the tweet that you’re about to re-broadcast.

Much more importantly, how you go about retweeting someone is crucial. Too many people are running around twitter hijacking tweets (leaving someone’s @name but changing the message and/or link), rewording tweets (putting words in someone’s mouth), wrongly attributing tweets (wrong RT order), or just flat out stealing tweets (not attributing to the originator).

The difference between RT @name and (via @name): This one’s not agreed upon by most, but that’s because not many people have put any thought into it. A good way to treat these is that an RT is equal to wrapping the tweet in quotes, while a (via @name) is more like providing a source but not necessarily quoting them. If you follow this, your tweets will be consistent and you’ll run less of a chance of offending someone by manhandling their tweets.

Twitter, Twit, Tweet and Tweeter: Why you sound retarded.

There used to be a consensus on this issue, back in the long long ago, in the early times. Then Oprah came and ruined the entire Internet by opening a twitter account. At that very moment no less than 5.2 billion people joined twitter and not one of them knew what the hell they were doing.

The company’s name is Twitter, the service is called twitter.

When you send a tweet, you are tweeting. If you’re tweeting over a period of time, then you’re twittering.

You may be a twit in real life, but you’re not a twit because you twitter. By the same token, you most certainly are not a tweet.

Tweeters are small speakers meant for higher frequency sound reproduction. While this one’s not necessarily as bad as the rest, you still sound silly calling people tweeters.