Although many of you probably use mobile or desktop clients such as Twibble or Tweetdeck to access Twitter, if you are using Twitter in your browser, and want to find out a little more about a Twitter user, there’s a faster way than visiting their profile.
Just type ‘whois username‘ into the twitter status field when logged in, and hit the [Update] button. (You don’t need the @ character preceeding username.)
Voila! You’ll be presented with the Name, Date of joining, Biography and URL for that user.
All that’s missing perhaps is the ability to immediately follow that user, or go to their profile page with a simple link – but it’s a quick way to check who’s who. Try it for yourself – [Open Twitter WHOIS in new Window] Simple. Nice. Who knew?
(Thanks to @andrewburnett for the tip, retweeted via @tomcritchlow from an original by @robousbey)
Use “f USERNAME” to follow :)
Agreed. Especially as twitter becomes more mainstream, these niceties start to count.
This is even faster: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bitly_plug-in_extends_tiny_urls_shows_clickthrough_numbers.php
Thanks Nick. The official twitter guide says ‘FOLLOW username’.
And ‘LEAVE username’ for the opposite if you don’t want to follow updates any more.
It would be nice if Twitter just added a ‘follow’ link to this feature, or had a few pop-up style interactions on the site to make it faster to use.