Never Use That Weird Period On Twitter Ever Again

How to skirt one of Twitter’s least-understood rules — and confuse your friends in the process.

I know, right? Now tell your friends!
Never Use That Weird Period On Twitter Eve...
Mike Hayes

Copy this space: ​. Great. Now never again will you be forced to place an awkward “.” in front of the @ on Twitter just so all your followers can see you scold @realdonaldtrump.

Last week, Isaac Hepworth, who as his bio explains has the coolest job at Twitter (“I do Unusual Projects at Twitter”), posted on his blog this hack for inserting a zero-width space into a tweet to essentially break Twitter’s rule that only mutual followers see tweets that start as an @ reply. The space still counts as a character to Twitter, but it doesn’t look like one to your followers.

As handy as this seems, the problems with this technique are multiple.

For one, nobody understands what you’re doing at first. People will think you screwed up and forgot the period, or that Twitter is broken somehow. You will have to explain yourself.

Or you can just continue to mess with them.

Secondly, there’s no way to directly type this special character on a Mac. Mac users like myself have to copy it from somewhere else, or pull it up from a special character selection menu. (If this all seems rather strange and hacky, that’s because it is.)

There is also a script that you can run if 1.) You have a PC and 2.) You are tech-savvy enough and care deeply enough to implement a script for tweets.

Otherwise, again, just copy this: ​, save it somewhere, and enjoy: You’re now breaking a Twitter rule.

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    4 Responses So Far

    • maryl24 thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is WTF  about a month ago
    • stormberry thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Win  about a month ago
    • Griko Nibras   Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte...  about 2 months ago
    • Jack Nathanson 2 months ago

      are people still tweeting?

    • Patty Lazatin thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Geeky  about 2 months ago
    • krisztinai 2 months ago

      What great timing. We just learned about this exact problem in class this week. Glad to know there’s a way to circumvent it.

    • Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is starting to get hot on Twitter Tweet It  about 2 months ago
    • thecultofpop thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Geeky & Win  about 2 months ago
    • Web Sta 2 months ago

      Re: the rules of a computer system: Some rules can be bent; others, broken.

    • alexruthie   Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte...  about 2 months ago
    • violet7lite   Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... and thinks it’s Win  about 2 months ago
    • JaeGrrBombs   Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte...  about 2 months ago
    • blakewoodellison thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Win  about 2 months ago
    • Alanna Okun thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Win  about 2 months ago
    • tbish92 thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Geeky  about 2 months ago
    • fanaca thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is LOL  about 2 months ago
    • Lucas Witherspoon   Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte...  about 2 months ago
    • Leron V thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Powerful  about 2 months ago
    • Ashley S 2 months ago

      Or as a mac user I’ll just use the period, or place the username I’m tweeting to somewhere else in the tweet, because does it really matter?

    • Elis thinks Never Use That Weird Period On Twitte... is Win  about 2 months ago
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