Slang Of The Facebookverse

Every phenomenon that spreads quickly around the world must come complete with its own lexicon of slang. Being a heavily text-based phenomenon, Facebook is perhaps a more complete example of this than any other. Starting with the practice of writing a message on Facebook, or “Tweeting”, this slang refers to a great deal of other topics as well. If you wish to send a message to one specific user, you use the @ symbol followed by their ID, and this is known as an “at-reply”. If they do not wish for this message to show up in their feed for the notice of other users, they may send it as a direct message, or simply “DM”.

Of course one of the most commonly used pieces of slang is “re-tweeting”, which is largely self-explanatory, referring as it does to the practice of copying and crediting the “tweet” of another user. It is not dissimilar to a chain e-mail. Then there is the list of tweets that you read from fellow users. The tweets themselves turn up in what is known as your “feed”. Your feed will be particularly busy if you “follow” a lot of people – which is the fairly obvious slang for reading their tweets.

A piece of slang which is not limited to Facebook but has found its natural home there is “Crowdsourcing”. This refers to asking a question or requesting a favor via Facebook which, when read by your followers, will gain you a lot of information or help from a number of people – or a crowd.

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Please Re-Tweet Me…

If someone told you back in 2008 that one day they would re-tweet you, you would have probably called a doctor and stayed with them until such time as the emergency services arrived. The word sounds bizarre and even a little bit embarrassing, but it has become common currency among Facebook users. Essentially, a re-tweet is when someone picks up on a “Tweet” you have made and, attaching your Facebook ID by means of an @ sign, lets their own followers know what you have said. Depending on how large their number of followers is, it could get you quite a lot of attention.

This occasionally leads to the phenomenon of users writing Tweets which are obviously designed to be re-tweeted, usually ones which deal with a topical issue and are at least passably funny, or at least thought-provoking. The upshot of this is that some users have “feeds” (lists of Tweets) that are made up almost entirely of re-tweets. This type of follower gets un-followed very quickly by a lot of users, who are generally sick of reading the same thing repeatedly.

Re-tweeting is one way in which messages can spread from a single account to multiple feeds in a very short space of time, and is often used by political parties or commercial enterprises to drum up publicity in a very short space of time for little or no cost. Many people, though, will continue to wish it was called something other than “re-tweeting”, for what it’s worth.

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