8 ms·

Is it true that you can't tweet "Get Better."?

211 points by ivoflipse 14y ago

cfinke 14y ago
It's most likely because "get [username]" is the Twitter SMS command to retrieve a list of tweets from [username]: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# I would wager a guess that you can't tweet "Fav Better" or "Stats Better" either.
- treetrouble 14y ago
  "Get" is the 48th most commonly used word in US English. This seems like excusably poor engineering not to prefix commands with a character like $. Granted, I'm not a Twitter user so maybe there's a reason?
  - courtewing 14y ago
    Being the 48th most commonly used word in US English is a little misleading in this case, though. Verbs such as "get", common as they are, are rarely used to begin a thought.
    - treetrouble 14y ago
      You're right that it wouldn't be the 48th most common word to begin a sentence. Still, it's not uncommon enough to warrant not prefixing it. This goes for "stats" as well...
    - aw3c2 14y ago
      get smart get bend get cake and meet me get lucky: get me some abc get this: These were ones that came to mind in 2 minutes. get it? edit: These lines give my comment a weird tone. Not intended, I just thought of random common examples.
      - thenonsequitur 14y ago
        The parameter count is enforced for each command. For GET, it needs exactly one parameter or it won't be treated as a command. So from your examples above, the longer lines would tweet fine. I agree with treetrouble, however, this was a really bad engineering decision. They should have come up with a tweet prefix to mean "command", some symbol that would not ever start a real tweet.
        mistercow 14y ago
        Yeah, /get or :get would have been way better commands, and they have precedent in preexisting social media like IRC and MUDs.
        ansgri 14y ago
        They would be very inconvenient to type on the traditional cell phone though.
        thenonsequitur 14y ago
        Well it doesn't have to be a symbol, just something that would not be likely to start a real tweet. Just as an example let's say "q", followed by a space, followed by the command with the appropriate number of parameters, e.g., "q get username". That would allow otherwise-reasonable tweets that are currently being mis-interpreted ("get better" vs. "q get better"). That's just an example. There are other ways around the problem too without making things too inconvenient on a smartphone user. And sure it's possible someone somewhere will want to write a real tweet that says "q get better", but that's far far less likely than someone somewhere wanting to tweet "get better". And the point is that allowing a non-trivial portion of the tweet-space overlap with the command-space is a bad decision. A trivial overlap (like "q get better") would have been a much better decision.
      - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
        get out, get in, get in shape, get laid, get up, get down, get http://example.com/file.zip http://example.com/file.zip It really is poor engineering, any non-letter prefix would have been good enough.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Forcing the typing a command character on a ten-digit phone pad might have caused enough friction to have put Twitter on a very different trajectory early on. Given how long Twitter has had this feature and how little issue it's caused, I would argue it was good product design.
    - hesselink 14y ago
      Perhaps duplicating the first letter would have been a good idea. So 'gget', 'ffav' etc.
    - treetrouble 14y ago
      good design implies that there's some advantage to its use
      - tedunangst 14y ago
        ? I can use a simple command to request tweets on my dumb phone. How is that not an advantage?
        treetrouble 14y ago
        Is it not still simple with a single character prefix?
        tedunangst 14y ago
        Depends on your userbase. Completely in band normal English command messages probably fits many users' mental model.
- nhebb 14y ago
  > https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# When I saw that I thought, "Wait, there's actually a manual for this thing?". Of course there is, but I wonder how many people have actually read it. <1%?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Confirmed. And 'please get better' works fine. That being said perhaps people should use g3t better :-). It is an interesting case study on overloading a channel (in-band administration vs out-of-band) and damaging legitimate traffic. A fix would be to prefix the command keys with an introducer :get <username> or :fav <user> but given the bazillion clients and such doing that would be hard. Most famous in-band admin hack has to be the +++ syntax for Hayes modems which flipped the mode bit into 'command' mode serial comms mode. It was even patented.
  - praptak 14y ago
    > Most famous in-band admin hack has to be the +++ syntax for Hayes modems which flipped the mode bit into 'command' mode serial comms mode. Unlike this case the +++ hack did not really limit legitimate data you could send on Hayes. As far as I remember it had to be preceded and followed by pauses, so transmitting this comment wouldn't trigger it.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Yes, the pauses were essential to the patent. As I recall they had to be a specific length and a couple of knock offs worked around the patent by making them slightly shorter.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      From what I recall (and this could very well be apocryphal), the pauses were what was patented. Non-Hayes modems still reacted to +++ but didn't need the pause. So if you could trick their software into sending "+++ATH;ATDT911" you would make them call 911. I'd love confirmation or denial of that patent thing.
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        From the wikipedia page (so take it with a wikipedia sized grain of salt :-) "Hayes had patented this concept in 1985 in patent #4,549,302, the Modem With Improved Escape Sequence With Guard Time Mechanism, generally referred to as the "Hayes '302 patent". Hayes licensed the guard time to other manufacturers for $1 a modem – a charge which competitors derisively termed the "modem tax". A number of manufacturers banded together and introduced the Time Independent Escape Sequence, or TIES, but it was not as robust as Heatherington's system and never became very successful."
- blueskittle 14y ago
  Oh to be this guy: https://twitter.com/#!/better https://twitter.com/#!/better
- darkstalker 14y ago
  If I don't have twitter SMS enabled, it shouldn't parse SMS commands. It should parse only when sent from the "txt" application (that's how twitter SMS is called)
__alexs 14y ago
Seems likely to be related to the Twitter in-band signalling thing that caused the accept bug back in 2010. http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ridiculous-follow-bug http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ri...
Peroni 14y ago
It appears the obvious answer may be correct: The reason that certain tweet content appears to do nothing is that Twitter is interpreting them as commands, according to this article: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020 https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020 The get command will send the latest tweet from the named user to your phone. I've tried some of the other commands listed in that article, and they don't post a tweet. They do, however, have the listed effect. For example, fav accountname does indeed mark the most recent tweet from accountname as a favourite. It's perhaps useful to remember that'd accountname Some message here will send a direct message to accountname, even if entered in the public tweet box or via another client. This shows that they have a standard text to action parser that works on tweets as they are submitted. So, to answer your question: No, it's not down to Jack Dorsey's father. It's purely because Twitter is interpreting it as a command. Sorry!
achughes 14y ago
It seems to me like this could potentially be used as an exploit.
- bri3d 14y ago
  It was, back in 2010: http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ridiculous-follow-bug http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ri... .
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
aangjie 14y ago
Wonder if they have a escape character in that text-action parser?
- genezeta 14y ago
  Sure https://twitter.com/VenkyLeFou/status/205361434039816194 https://twitter.com/VenkyLeFou/status/205361434039816194
loftwyr 14y ago
It seems odd to me that they would have the same command filter on the web client as the SMS handler. What possible reason would you have for that? Wouldn't it just be smart to have the web client bypass the command handler altogether?
- pepdek 14y ago
  Heaven forbid they make the mobile/SMS UX the same as the web client.
  - gwy 14y ago
    But keeping the same UX is harmful in this situation -- on SMS it's a common pattern to use text commands, but in the desktop context you'd never expect it (and the commands don't make sense).
    - cdcarter 14y ago
      It makes sending a direct message a lot easier than wading through the web UX. It's great for power users
    - esrauch 14y ago
      I worked at Amazon and we found (to our surprise) that power users were using these commands from the build in Kindle tweeting functionality. I think the number of power users using this feature is probably actually higher than the number of false positives of exactly 2 word tweets where the first is get
ageektrapped 14y ago
I found this to be true with the term 'M$', specifically with the '$'. I didn't think that term was still a thing, and then I came across it in an email. I wanted to note my surprise on twitter, making a ridiculous comparison that I shall not repeat here, but the tweet would NOT go through. Change the '$' to 'S' and everything is cool.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Angostura 14y ago
Little Bobby Tables strikes again, potentially?
gee_totes 14y ago
I find the explanation posted in the question more fascinating than the actual answer: while in High School, Dorsey's father used to spur him to work harder with that exact sentence. For me, this implies that the creator of Twitter hated his father's trademark phrase, and by extension his father's demands to work harder, so much that Dorsey would explicitly put a ban on the phrase to spite his father. This follows humanity's tradition of creating myths to explain things we don't understand[0], but it's exciting to see the mystery phenomena revealed as something created entirely by man. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(mythology)
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  Any tweet beginning with "get" yields the same result. It's being interpreted as an API command.
joezydeco 14y ago
"..it's perhaps useful to remember that d accountname Some message here will send a direct message to accountname, even if entered in the public tweet box or via another client" d, and and dm as well.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sparknlaunch12 14y ago
Apparently "get" is a twitter command and hence cannot be displayed as twitter tries to execute a command rather than display a message. Strange that it cannot pass the message as a string to avoid it being caught as a command? There a few other twitter oddities. You can actually tweetmore than 140 characters. Face book has a thing with certain numbers representing users in status updates.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
capkutay 14y ago
Also...when I try to tweet "; DROP TABLE;" it cleared all my friends tweets!
pndmnm 14y ago
Relatedly, there was an in-channel-command bug in Twitter in 2010 that would allow you to force anyone to follow you by tweeting "accept [username]". It was discovered accidentally by a fan of a band named "Accept" tweeting "accept pwnz": http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitocalypse-heavy-metal/ http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitocalypse-heavy-metal/
septerr 14y ago
Hmm. If I (septerr) did RT septerr, will that start an infinite loop?
pseale 14y ago
Related: you can't create filenames in DOS reserved by devices. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_can%27t_you_create_a_folder_named_CON_in_Windows_or_MS-DOS http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_can%27t_you_create_a_folder_na...
voxx 14y ago
Whoa, I was not expecting a discussion about grammer. Damn I love HN.
jsharpe 14y ago
I didn't seem to have any trouble posting "get better": https://twitter.com/jeremysharpe/status/205522693821448193 https://twitter.com/jeremysharpe/status/205522693821448193 ;)
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
SMS is probably the root of quite a few Twitter restrictions, not just this one. For instance, the length of a tweet. I think it's 140 characters so they can fit it in an SMS message along with the username or command.

211 points by ivoflipse 14y ago

It's most likely because "get [username]" is the Twitter SMS command to retrieve a list of tweets from [username]: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# I would wager a guess that you can't tweet "Fav Better" or "Stats Better" either.

treetrouble 14y ago
"Get" is the 48th most commonly used word in US English. This seems like excusably poor engineering not to prefix commands with a character like $. Granted, I'm not a Twitter user so maybe there's a reason?
- courtewing 14y ago
  Being the 48th most commonly used word in US English is a little misleading in this case, though. Verbs such as "get", common as they are, are rarely used to begin a thought.
  - treetrouble 14y ago
    You're right that it wouldn't be the 48th most common word to begin a sentence. Still, it's not uncommon enough to warrant not prefixing it. This goes for "stats" as well...
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    get smart get bend get cake and meet me get lucky: get me some abc get this: These were ones that came to mind in 2 minutes. get it? edit: These lines give my comment a weird tone. Not intended, I just thought of random common examples.
    - thenonsequitur 14y ago
      The parameter count is enforced for each command. For GET, it needs exactly one parameter or it won't be treated as a command. So from your examples above, the longer lines would tweet fine. I agree with treetrouble, however, this was a really bad engineering decision. They should have come up with a tweet prefix to mean "command", some symbol that would not ever start a real tweet.
      - mistercow 14y ago
        Yeah, /get or :get would have been way better commands, and they have precedent in preexisting social media like IRC and MUDs.
        ansgri 14y ago
        They would be very inconvenient to type on the traditional cell phone though.
        thenonsequitur 14y ago
        Well it doesn't have to be a symbol, just something that would not be likely to start a real tweet. Just as an example let's say "q", followed by a space, followed by the command with the appropriate number of parameters, e.g., "q get username". That would allow otherwise-reasonable tweets that are currently being mis-interpreted ("get better" vs. "q get better"). That's just an example. There are other ways around the problem too without making things too inconvenient on a smartphone user. And sure it's possible someone somewhere will want to write a real tweet that says "q get better", but that's far far less likely than someone somewhere wanting to tweet "get better". And the point is that allowing a non-trivial portion of the tweet-space overlap with the command-space is a bad decision. A trivial overlap (like "q get better") would have been a much better decision.
    - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
      get out, get in, get in shape, get laid, get up, get down, get http://example.com/file.zip http://example.com/file.zip It really is poor engineering, any non-letter prefix would have been good enough.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Forcing the typing a command character on a ten-digit phone pad might have caused enough friction to have put Twitter on a very different trajectory early on. Given how long Twitter has had this feature and how little issue it's caused, I would argue it was good product design.
  - hesselink 14y ago
    Perhaps duplicating the first letter would have been a good idea. So 'gget', 'ffav' etc.
  - treetrouble 14y ago
    good design implies that there's some advantage to its use
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      ? I can use a simple command to request tweets on my dumb phone. How is that not an advantage?
      - treetrouble 14y ago
        Is it not still simple with a single character prefix?
        tedunangst 14y ago
        Depends on your userbase. Completely in band normal English command messages probably fits many users' mental model.
nhebb 14y ago
> https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020# When I saw that I thought, "Wait, there's actually a manual for this thing?". Of course there is, but I wonder how many people have actually read it. <1%?
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Confirmed. And 'please get better' works fine. That being said perhaps people should use g3t better :-). It is an interesting case study on overloading a channel (in-band administration vs out-of-band) and damaging legitimate traffic. A fix would be to prefix the command keys with an introducer :get <username> or :fav <user> but given the bazillion clients and such doing that would be hard. Most famous in-band admin hack has to be the +++ syntax for Hayes modems which flipped the mode bit into 'command' mode serial comms mode. It was even patented.
- praptak 14y ago
  > Most famous in-band admin hack has to be the +++ syntax for Hayes modems which flipped the mode bit into 'command' mode serial comms mode. Unlike this case the +++ hack did not really limit legitimate data you could send on Hayes. As far as I remember it had to be preceded and followed by pauses, so transmitting this comment wouldn't trigger it.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Yes, the pauses were essential to the patent. As I recall they had to be a specific length and a couple of knock offs worked around the patent by making them slightly shorter.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    From what I recall (and this could very well be apocryphal), the pauses were what was patented. Non-Hayes modems still reacted to +++ but didn't need the pause. So if you could trick their software into sending "+++ATH;ATDT911" you would make them call 911. I'd love confirmation or denial of that patent thing.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      From the wikipedia page (so take it with a wikipedia sized grain of salt :-) "Hayes had patented this concept in 1985 in patent #4,549,302, the Modem With Improved Escape Sequence With Guard Time Mechanism, generally referred to as the "Hayes '302 patent". Hayes licensed the guard time to other manufacturers for $1 a modem – a charge which competitors derisively termed the "modem tax". A number of manufacturers banded together and introduced the Time Independent Escape Sequence, or TIES, but it was not as robust as Heatherington's system and never became very successful."
blueskittle 14y ago
Oh to be this guy: https://twitter.com/#!/better https://twitter.com/#!/better
darkstalker 14y ago
If I don't have twitter SMS enabled, it shouldn't parse SMS commands. It should parse only when sent from the "txt" application (that's how twitter SMS is called)

__alexs 14y ago

Seems likely to be related to the Twitter in-band signalling thing that caused the accept bug back in 2010. http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ridiculous-follow-bug http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ri...

Peroni 14y ago

It appears the obvious answer may be correct: The reason that certain tweet content appears to do nothing is that Twitter is interpreting them as commands, according to this article: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020 https://support.twitter.com/articles/14020 The get command will send the latest tweet from the named user to your phone. I've tried some of the other commands listed in that article, and they don't post a tweet. They do, however, have the listed effect. For example, fav accountname does indeed mark the most recent tweet from accountname as a favourite. It's perhaps useful to remember that'd accountname Some message here will send a direct message to accountname, even if entered in the public tweet box or via another client. This shows that they have a standard text to action parser that works on tweets as they are submitted. So, to answer your question: No, it's not down to Jack Dorsey's father. It's purely because Twitter is interpreting it as a command. Sorry!

achughes 14y ago

It seems to me like this could potentially be used as an exploit.

bri3d 14y ago
It was, back in 2010: http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ridiculous-follow-bug http://gizmodo.com/5535536/the-real-story-behind-twitters-ri... .

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

aangjie 14y ago

Wonder if they have a escape character in that text-action parser?

genezeta 14y ago
Sure https://twitter.com/VenkyLeFou/status/205361434039816194 https://twitter.com/VenkyLeFou/status/205361434039816194

loftwyr 14y ago

It seems odd to me that they would have the same command filter on the web client as the SMS handler. What possible reason would you have for that? Wouldn't it just be smart to have the web client bypass the command handler altogether?

pepdek 14y ago
Heaven forbid they make the mobile/SMS UX the same as the web client.
- gwy 14y ago
  But keeping the same UX is harmful in this situation -- on SMS it's a common pattern to use text commands, but in the desktop context you'd never expect it (and the commands don't make sense).
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    It makes sending a direct message a lot easier than wading through the web UX. It's great for power users
  - esrauch 14y ago
    I worked at Amazon and we found (to our surprise) that power users were using these commands from the build in Kindle tweeting functionality. I think the number of power users using this feature is probably actually higher than the number of false positives of exactly 2 word tweets where the first is get

ageektrapped 14y ago

I found this to be true with the term 'M$', specifically with the '$'. I didn't think that term was still a thing, and then I came across it in an email. I wanted to note my surprise on twitter, making a ridiculous comparison that I shall not repeat here, but the tweet would NOT go through. Change the '$' to 'S' and everything is cool.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Angostura 14y ago

Little Bobby Tables strikes again, potentially?

gee_totes 14y ago

I find the explanation posted in the question more fascinating than the actual answer: while in High School, Dorsey's father used to spur him to work harder with that exact sentence. For me, this implies that the creator of Twitter hated his father's trademark phrase, and by extension his father's demands to work harder, so much that Dorsey would explicitly put a ban on the phrase to spite his father. This follows humanity's tradition of creating myths to explain things we don't understand[0], but it's exciting to see the mystery phenomena revealed as something created entirely by man. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(mythology)

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
Any tweet beginning with "get" yields the same result. It's being interpreted as an API command.

joezydeco 14y ago

"..it's perhaps useful to remember that d accountname Some message here will send a direct message to accountname, even if entered in the public tweet box or via another client" d, and and dm as well.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

sparknlaunch12 14y ago

Apparently "get" is a twitter command and hence cannot be displayed as twitter tries to execute a command rather than display a message. Strange that it cannot pass the message as a string to avoid it being caught as a command? There a few other twitter oddities. You can actually tweetmore than 140 characters. Face book has a thing with certain numbers representing users in status updates.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

capkutay 14y ago

Also...when I try to tweet "; DROP TABLE;" it cleared all my friends tweets!

pndmnm 14y ago

Relatedly, there was an in-channel-command bug in Twitter in 2010 that would allow you to force anyone to follow you by tweeting "accept [username]". It was discovered accidentally by a fan of a band named "Accept" tweeting "accept pwnz": http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitocalypse-heavy-metal/ http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitocalypse-heavy-metal/

septerr 14y ago

Hmm. If I (septerr) did RT septerr, will that start an infinite loop?

pseale 14y ago

Related: you can't create filenames in DOS reserved by devices. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_can%27t_you_create_a_folder_named_CON_in_Windows_or_MS-DOS http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_can%27t_you_create_a_folder_na...

voxx 14y ago

Whoa, I was not expecting a discussion about grammer. Damn I love HN.

jsharpe 14y ago

I didn't seem to have any trouble posting "get better": https://twitter.com/jeremysharpe/status/205522693821448193 https://twitter.com/jeremysharpe/status/205522693821448193 ;)

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

SMS is probably the root of quite a few Twitter restrictions, not just this one. For instance, the length of a tweet. I think it's 140 characters so they can fit it in an SMS message along with the username or command.