Now’s a decent Time To Turn Off Your Twitter DM Text Messages, Once you Don’t Wish to Embarrass Yourself [Twitter]

Twitter has a feature which could lead you to publicly humiliating yourself , so whenever you don’t enjoy embarrassment, now’s an excellent time to offer protection to yourself by shutting it down.

Specifically, Twitter has a feature – actually pretty useful – that permits you to receive private direct messages in your phone via SMS text message. It is a handy way of using Twitter as a real-time, private messaging system – type of what SMS was designed for.

Here’s how it works: If someone direct messages (” DMs” ) you on Twitter, you’ll get a text from 40404 (Twitter’s SMS shortcode) that claims something like ” Direct from fromedome,” with the message included.

The problem is that many folks respond to those text messages a similar way they respond to any other text messages: With an individual message intended for the individual that messaged them.

But that’s not how Twitter’s SMS system works – it treats that as a public tweet, and publishes it for everyone to look. That will send a right away message reply, you’ll want to you’ll want to type in ” d username” before the message. Each time. Twitter doesn’t think ofyou’ve got this for you.

The result is that day-to-day, we see ” accidental DMs” or ” DM fail” tweets ” via txt” which might be clearly meant to be direct messages. (And not just by new Twitter users, but usually by long-time users. It’s clearly something that folk can’t quite fully learn and remember.)

We don’t usually know who the messages are meant for, and sometimes they’re mundane or harmless. But every few days, we see something embarrassing.

Like today, when distinguished economist Nouriel Roubini trashed our colleague Joe Weisenthal in this ” off the record” tweet – which was clearly meant to be an instantaneous message – sent via SMS. 

If you don’t mind the occasional accident, and have nothing to hide, go ahead and keep the DM-to-SMS feature turned on.

But as a way to be sure you never screw up, here’s the best way to turn off this option: Go to Twitter’s mobile device settings (you’ll ought to check in) and under ” Text message notifications,” uncheck ” Direct messages.”

It’d be nice if Twitter found out a approach to this problem, because it’s actually quite handy to have DMs turned on via SMS. But we doubt that’s a priority for the company. So for now, how you can provide yourself with protection from accidentally tweeting direct messages is to turn off the feature completely.

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This post is tagged: economist nouriel roubini, message reply, messaging system, occasional accident, text messages