We all know what Twitter is, but not many of us know the quirky little things it does — because face it, we just make an account and start twittering. We don’t really read the documentation to see what it can do. Don’t worry, I don’t too. But I thought it’ll be interesting to chronicle the little things Twitter does behind the scenes that we don’t get to know.

’@’ Reply behaviour

• A reply only goes to the person it is directed to, unless there is a common follower. Suppose [B] and [C] follow. You send a reply to [A]. [B] and [C] will only get that tweet if they follow [A] as well. Update This is a setting, so it’s not a general quirk. But interesting nonetheless.

• If you mess up the handle, or in anyway send a reply to a non-user, the tweet is treated as a non-reply.

General

• The actual Twitter character limit is 250. The 140 is actually what is sent as updates to mobile phones. If you overshoot it, no problem - the permalink to the tweet shows the whole text. But that’s only till 250, after which it actually gets truncated. (via. @scorpion032)

• http and https both work for Twitter URLs. Try it

• If you favourite protected tweets, they are still visible to anyone not following the original user from your favourites list.