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I've tried to tweet "Get Better." (without the quotes) a dozen times now, and it keeps not showing. A friend of mine told me that, while in high school, Jack Dorsey's (the creator of Twitter) father used to spur him to work harder with that exact sentence.

I've done some research and couldn't find any evidence of this, neither an explanation of why you, apparently, can't tweet that exact sentence.

Sklivvz
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Thecafremo
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    Tried it, and some variations : "Get. Better.", "get better", all of these doesn't work. Weird. – slaphappy May 23 '12 at 10:24
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    Searching and playing around a bit, you also can't tweet the phrases "Get Some" or "On Duty" . I guess there are other phrases too. All in all a bit odd. The only acceptable answer I guess would come from twitter. – NotJarvis May 23 '12 at 10:47
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    interesting thing is its not the phrase "Get Better" that is filtered. Try any word after "Get" and you can't tweet the phrase. (I tried several e.g. "Get Spam", "Get Cheese" , and "Get out". The Dorsey Hypothesis therefore seems very unlikely. I guess its some anti-spam measure or summat. – NotJarvis May 23 '12 at 11:24
  • It might appear that that there isn't just an upper limit for tweets, but perhaps also a lower limit, that people usually don't hit? – sehe May 23 '12 at 11:26
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    Perhaps I should ask this in WebApps.SE ? – Thecafremo May 23 '12 at 11:30
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    It's clearly not a minimum character limit https://twitter.com/#!/notjarvis/status/205267987069014016 – NotJarvis May 23 '12 at 12:04
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    Heh. I didn't believe it until I created a test acct & tried it for myself. Has to be 1 or 2 word phrase. First word must be "get" (case insensitive). "Post", "List", "Drop" don't trigger it. Second word can be any length or contain punctuation. – Oddthinking May 23 '12 at 13:59
  • *Cleaned up the comments*... Please use the comments to talk about the question (there's the chat as well if you need). – Sklivvz May 23 '12 at 15:52
  • I've just tweeted "Get real! " See http://www.twitter.com/alvrod/status/205328390268534784 – Alvaro Rodriguez May 23 '12 at 16:06
  • @AlvaroRodriguez - As per the selected answer, it only works with the syntax of `get `, so putting more than one word will not trigger the command. For example, `Get at me, bro` will work, while `Get AtMeBro` won't. – Nick May 23 '12 at 17:02
  • It works now :) I just tried all the possible variations of "Get Better" – Ken Mar 20 '14 at 10:11

1 Answers1

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The reason that certain tweet content appears to do nothing is that Twitter is interpreting them as commands, according to this article:

  • GET [username] - retrieves the latest Twitter update posted by that person. You can also use g [username] to get a user's latest Tweet. Examples: get goldman or g goldman.

—Twitter SMS Commands

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!

Sklivvz
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DMI
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    I must admit I never really considered the father's explanation as such, but couldn't find anything to gainsay my friend! Thank you! – Thecafremo May 23 '12 at 15:08
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    As an active web developer who works with the Twitter API on a daily basis, This. This is the reason why you can't put in "Get Better", though your reason is very compelling. Try "Get Worse" and it won't work either. – buzzedword May 23 '12 at 15:20
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    I'm disappointed that link doesn't specify a way of escaping tweets that could be interpreted as commands. Is there an official method of actually tweeting "get better", or some unsanctioned workaround? – Simon May 23 '12 at 18:05
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    Untested: try prefixing with a space or a dot. Alternatively, add more words :-) – DMI May 24 '12 at 09:19
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    So logically, someone needs to go get the user named "better" to exploit this.... – RBerteig May 24 '12 at 21:27
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    @RBerteig And if their last tweet is "Get Better"..... – David Starkey Aug 13 '13 at 18:03
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    @Simon This is untested, but I'll bet it will work: Replace the letter "e" in "Get" with the equivalent unicode Cyrillic letter (U+0435). You might be able to copy/paste this: "Gеt Better." – ESultanik Mar 20 '14 at 13:12