How Not to Be a Jackass on Twitter

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace—basically, they're all platforms that allow you to demonstrate just how much you suck, writes Lindsay Cutler for Nerve. And even though Twitter limits potential sucking to 140 characters or less (yay!), we still manage to come off like jackasses (boo!). To help you out, Cutler shares the "9 essentials of Twitter Etiquette":

1. Leave live-tweeting to the professionals: Your live-tweeting clutters my feed, so "unless you have your own column at Salon or at least a Tumblr dedicated to the same general subject matter," keep your Oscars quips to yourself.

2. Share your depression with professionals, too: Like, a therapist. Or at the very least, record your overeating/relationship/health-related doldrums in your diary. "Your weirdly honest confession terrifies me."
3. Don't pretend you're a celeb: No. 1, your fake account will get suspended. No. 2, "you will no doubt disappoint the masses who look forward to reading the small thoughts that Celebrity X thinks every day."
4. Don't re-tweet the NYT: Or any of the bigwigs." If your followers consider themselves people of any kind of caliber, they already follow NPR or NYT or TheRealShaq."
5. Follow Newser: OK, so this didn't really make Cutler's cut. But it should have.

For the other tips Cutler actually wrote, including a ruling on Twitpics, click here.

(More Twitter stories.)