Using Twitter from Video DownloadHelper

Twitter is a service over the Web that allows you to send small messages (140 characters or less). Other Twitter users who follow you will receive your message immediately. Sounds stupidly basic ? Well, yes. But when million people use something, there must be a good and useful idea behind.

To learn more about Twitter, you can read the Twitter article on Wikipedia, have fun with Shane Nickerson's 46 stages of Twitter, or simply go to Twitter.com and make up your mind by yourself.

Using the Twitter service on Video DownloadHelper is easy. The sub-menu attached to the video entry in the download menu shows 'Tweet this video'.

This service is also available in the YouTube widget menu.

On the first use, this will take you to the preferences dialog so you can enter your Twitter user name and password. If you don't have a Twitter account yet, a button takes you to the Twitter signup page (Full details about the Twitter preferences are here).

Once the Twitter credentials are set, the Twitter service takes you directly to a dialog where you can edit the message before sending it.

The number displayed at the top left (here '89') is the maximum number of characters left for this message (Remember a Twitter message cannot be longer than 140 characters).

The message content part is already pre-filled with some information:

• The title of the video and if available, its description. Note that in order to get directly an accurate title and description, it is better to use the Smart Naming feature.
• A link to the vdh.bz domain that will take the reader directly to the Web page containing the video. As the Twitter messages are limited in length, it is a very common practice to use an URL shortener of that kind. We do run our own shortener service for this purpose. Note that we collect statistics on this service in a purely anonymous way.
• A #vidohe tag. This '#' syntax is very popular on Twitter to indicate a keyword. Having this tag will allow Twitter users to easily find tweets (Twitter messages). If you don't want your messages to be found that way, you can delete the tag in the editor or go to the preferences, section Services, tab Twitter and uncheck the parameter Prefill message with tag #vidohe.