Twitter - anyone well informed about it?

[MN Dave]

And you are another reason I might just dip my toes back into the Twitter pool.

I may just consult you on that.

Sounds good,  guvnah.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

If you do want more privacy it's worth going through your privacy settings once you create an account just so that, eg, people can't find you by searching your email or phone number, & to control the kind of targeted ads and content twitter will attempt to show you, & there is a setting to prevent Twitter from rifling through your contacts list to show you "people you may know" (note that if you choose this setting Twitter replaces the "people you may know" window with a "find your contacts" window, but it is still probably accessing your contact list for advertising purposes & in case they need to turn it over to the Five Eyes intelligence group. so don't expect too much privacy. use an adblocker, which will at least hide the ads and cut into their margins slightly)

This won't be related to the OP query, but I have a hard and fast rule of no social media apps on my phone (twitter, facebook, etc). I want to prevent them from scraping information from my phone (contact list, etc) which is more extensive than what is available to my web browser. And I always say no when any social media site it asks if it can look at anything (contact list, etc).

[NikF]

Not sure this was mentioned but you can make lists within Twitter. If you follow a lot of accounts but don't feel like reading everything, you can create a list of those important accounts and just access that.

No, I didn't know that, but it sounds useful and potentially removes one of the issues making me hesitate to use Twitter.. Cheers.

This won't be related to the OP query, but I have a hard and fast rule of no social media apps on my phone (twitter, facebook, etc). I want to prevent them from scraping information from my phone (contact list, etc) which is more extensive than what is available to my web browser. And I always say no when any social media site it asks if it can look at anything (contact list, etc).

If I had a smartphone I wouldn't be giving apps access to any of that stuff either.

[NikF]

I've added a Twitter link to my profile - at least, I believe so...I thought there might be a special little icon or something? - and although I've no intention of interacting and really only want to use it as a source of updates for concerts and stuff (and I won't be posting any of my work or seeking to view that of others) if anyone still wants to add me to their stream, go right ahead.