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Comment by treetrouble | Hacker News Reader

"Get" is the 48th most commonly used word in US English. This seems like excusably poor engineering not to prefix commands with a character like $. Granted, I'm not a Twitter user so maybe there's a reason?

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Forcing the typing a command character on a ten-digit phone pad might have caused enough friction to have put Twitter on a very different trajectory early on. Given how long Twitter has had this feature and how little issue it's caused, I would argue it was good product design.

Perhaps duplicating the first letter would have been a good idea. So 'gget', 'ffav' etc.

good design implies that there's some advantage to its use

? I can use a simple command to request tweets on my dumb phone. How is that not an advantage?

Is it not still simple with a single character prefix?

Depends on your userbase. Completely in band normal English command messages probably fits many users' mental model.

Being the 48th most commonly used word in US English is a little misleading in this case, though. Verbs such as "get", common as they are, are rarely used to begin a thought.

You're right that it wouldn't be the 48th most common word to begin a sentence. Still, it's not uncommon enough to warrant not prefixing it. This goes for "stats" as well...

get smart

get bend

get cake and meet me

get lucky:

get me some abc

get this: These were ones that came to mind in 2 minutes.

get it?

edit: These lines give my comment a weird tone. Not intended, I just thought of random common examples.

The parameter count is enforced for each command. For GET, it needs exactly one parameter or it won't be treated as a command. So from your examples above, the longer lines would tweet fine.

I agree with treetrouble, however, this was a really bad engineering decision. They should have come up with a tweet prefix to mean "command", some symbol that would not ever start a real tweet.

Yeah, /get or :get would have been way better commands, and they have precedent in preexisting social media like IRC and MUDs.

They would be very inconvenient to type on the traditional cell phone though.

Well it doesn't have to be a symbol, just something that would not be likely to start a real tweet.

Just as an example let's say "q", followed by a space, followed by the command with the appropriate number of parameters, e.g., "q get username". That would allow otherwise-reasonable tweets that are currently being mis-interpreted ("get better" vs. "q get better").

That's just an example. There are other ways around the problem too without making things too inconvenient on a smartphone user. And sure it's possible someone somewhere will want to write a real tweet that says "q get better", but that's far far less likely than someone somewhere wanting to tweet "get better". And the point is that allowing a non-trivial portion of the tweet-space overlap with the command-space is a bad decision. A trivial overlap (like "q get better") would have been a much better decision.

get out, get in, get in shape, get laid, get up, get down, get http://example.com/file.zip

It really is poor engineering, any non-letter prefix would have been good enough.

Well there aren't many convenient choices on a phone. # is used in twitter, * is often used by the carrier. Might have been better to prefix with just "z".

disabling the use of #get as a hashtag is still better than disabling its use as an english word

Twitter existed before the hash-tag - that was a user created meme: http://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-what-are-hashtags-...

"Get" in its present-tense for is very difficult to use to start a sentence. It sounds highly idiomatic ("wrong") not to precede it with either a subject ("I get six floppies for a dollar at the thrift store."), or to recede to the infinitive ("To get six floppies for a dollar is a very good deal."). Using a gerund makes it easier, but then you're not dealing with the plain "get" anymore.

Get real! ;)

I can just imagine promotional tweets gone wrong, e.g.:

"Get your tickets to Blind Guardian concert! Only 500 left!"

Fortunately, this wouldn't be a problem since there are more than two words

The second is definitely not a sentence, and the first is idiomatic with it's implied subject. :)

The second person imperative always implies the subject (at least since we stopped saying thee, and even then the subject and verb were inverted, as it remains in the first person plural imperative). The first sentence in the second example is a complete sentence; only the second is a fragment.

If you see an imperative "get" with an apparent subject, it's probably a topic rather than a subject:

"Paul, get your boots on and get going!"

You are speaking to Paul:

"Get your boots on and get going!"

You use the topic to designate or call attention; it's not the subject of the sentence.

I didn't think, but let Google surprise me with what it suggested when I typed "get ":

get directions

get him to the greek

get glue

get smart

get low lyrics

get off my internets

get rich slowly

get away today

get to know you questions

get fuzzy

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