A lot of times I have seen twitter users wondering how to send DM’s (direct messages) to ppl who are not following them. Since I have had the pleasure of explaining it so many times on twitter, I thought I would just write it once and for all and share the link from now on. So here goes.
To send a DM to anyone who’s not following you, just “derive” their URL to create a DM message.
The URL would be http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/<username> where you need to replace the <username> with the twitter id. for eg. to send a DM to me, you would use the following link
Hope this makes your twitter communication quick and easy!
UPDATE:
Since twitter has updated its interface since last night, this hack now shows an error message. However it STILL works. Please ignore the error message.
UPDATE 2:
Following this post, twitter.com has suddenly realised some sort of a “loophole”, treated this thing as a “bug” and fixed it as well. Now this hack would not work in any circumstances. You simply can not DM anyone who’s not following you. As a policy or design decision I dont quite agree with it. People can send orkut messages, facebook messages, flickr messages to anyone at all. Why can twitter messages not be enabled? It’s very much required as a feature going by the number of hits this post received in the short time that this hack was working.
Where can I find URL??
It’s a privacy violation. Being able to DM people who are not following you is like being able to email people whose email address you haven’t been given formally.
That’s not right. Some celebs could end up with huge numbers of unwanted DMs.
Jen – see all replies above. All social networks allow such communication (basic messaging) to happen (Facebook, orkut, flickr). There are always ways to have settings which also give this as a choice to ppl on whether they want to be contactable this way.
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Any news about sending twitter DM’s to non-followers??
Sina – no new hack yet.
Can you still send a direct message on Facebook anymore (to people who aren’t your friend)? I cannot see how to do it. I doesn’t seem to let you.
national water council– i think it does allow you still, though of course all users have the option of choosing whether they want to be “contactable” or “searchable” and much of all these settings depends on various parameters like “friends of friends” or “ppl in the same network” etc. so for some ppl you may not be able to send them a message but for others you might be able to.
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I tried your solution and it worked
ary – looks like it keeps working on and off!
What do I have to do?
cool ! this works ,but sadly now no one is interested in reading dm’z ,coz most of d dm’z are automated and ppl only read their @ replys ,anywayz good hack 😛
Sina – the answer to that is in the post itself.
vertexroll – does it really? I tried it again and it doesnt work for me!
doesnt work for me either
I tried this >> http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/
help help help!!
awesome, thanks for the tips!
A.
Uhm it dont even work.. anymore
Yeah, twitter should fix its design to allow usual direct messages…
Poor.
Comment envoyer un DM Ã quelqu’un qui ne vous suit pas : http://blog.twilightfairy.in/2008/09/19/send-twitter-dm-to-non-followers/
This no longer works, Twitter obviously found out and now blocked it. Just like Facebook, Twitter will eventually become utterly useless DISABLEWARE !!!
I think they do it to prevent spam. If you can get messages from anyone, including people you don’t follow, that opens you up to spammers, stalkers, trolls, and haters.
eric yeah well, Twitter actually has a setting precisely for this. Now they allow anyone to receive a DM from anyone, but u can always choose not to have this setting active. Also, don’t know if you noticed, this post is about 7 years old! 🙂