Netiquette: 20 tweets to make your toes curl

Below are 20 types of tweet that make our toes curl, from exchanges between celebrities who only engage with each other, to people who will type anything to win an Apple gadget.

1) Mock surprise at your own success
Self-promotion is one of the main reasons to join Twitter and is central to its continued success, so we can all drop the false modesty. Tweets like "stunned by the great response to my blog, keep it coming guys" may sound charmingly coy in your head, but people can see through the self-deprecation.

2) Group tweeting on a night out
If everyone around the table feels the need to dive to their phones to tell the internet how much fun they're having, they can't be having that much fun. People who strain to look popular just appear incapable of enjoying an experience without audience validation.

3) Anything, anything, anything about sex
That message may sound erotic to you, the person who joined Twitter just to stalk you, and (if you're lucky) the person you joined Twitter just to stalk. But remember that it will be read by dozens of people double and half your age who don't wish to see you as a sexual object. If you wouldn't say it out loud on a packed train carriage, you're best off not pressing enter.

4) 'So bored'
You're on the internet, go learn something.

5) RIP <insert celebrity's name here>
Tweets that merely record your awareness of someone's death smack of me-tooism, and are of zero interest or value to your followers. Since Michael Jackson's passing, certain Twitter users seem to take delight from the thrill of being the first of their friendship group to "announce" a celebrity death. It's morbid and it's scaring Jeff Goldblum's family, so stop.

6) Intimate family moments
The occasional tweet about family life makes a pleasant change to updates about work and pop culture, but does your daughter really want hundreds of her mother's acquaintances to know that she's having trouble at school?

7) Public feuds
It's impossible to fight on Twitter and not look like a stroppy eight-year-old. And as both parties want to have the last word the spat can eat up entire afternoons.

8) I'm a celebrity and I'm friends with other celebrities and we're just too witty
The little people did not join Twitter to bask in the glow of your fabulously glamorous lives, famous people. The direct message feature was created for prolonged two-way conversations.

9) 'Inspirational' quotations
One man's motivational motto is another's saccharine guff. Your followers may start to mistake you for one of the spambots that fire out nuggets of Deepak Chopra wisdom to tempt clicks.

10) One household chore, several vapid tweets
Assembling a chest of drawers from Ikea is an excellent subject for a tweet, whether it's written with pride in success or confusion and sorrow at failure. But some twitterers fall down by opting for a blow by blow account: "Can't find the nail". "Ah, there it is". "Hmmmmm". "Getting there. Slowly but getting there". Why not wait until the end of the task and wrap up the whole giddying experience as a single update, complete with a triumphant Twitpic?

11) #Moonfruit
The website building company must have been stunned by the response to its Twitter promotion, which involved giving away MacBook Pro computers to 10 random people who included the term #moonfruit in their updates. Tens of thousands of people took part, keeping #moonfruit at the top of the list of trending topics for days. Watching online marketers learned a dreadful lesson: dangle free Apple gadgets in front of the twittering public and they will dance to your tune, no matter how demeaning.

12) Funerals
It should go without saying that live-blogging a burial is insensitive and inappropriate, but there have been instances. In 2008 the Rocky Mountain News sent a reporter to tweet the funeral of a three-year-old boy who had been killed in a car crash. The coverage included the tweet "family members shovel earth into grave".

13) One word tweets
With the possible exceptions of "dying" or "help", no single word can justify a tweet. If you're not prepared to put in the effort to compose something of interest to your followers then there is no reason to trouble them. Thinly-disguise appeals for @replies - such as "thinking" or "worried" - are particularly reprehensible.

14) Solipsism
Dwelling on your own connection to disasters and major news events may be natural, but it's easy to cross the boundary into self-absorption. Here's a notably horrendous example from Tony Robbins, the American self-help writer and "life strategist", on the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks:

"In honor of 9-1-1 we’re showing the film of what I was doing that day. I’ll never forget it. RT if you like it. http://sn.im/rqp0".

15) 'What did I miss?'
Any tweet that presumes that the rest of the internet noticed or cared about your "off grid" sabbatical sounds conceited. We weren't just chatting amongst ourselves waiting for you to come back. The same rule applies to any tweets - such as "so it's finally here" - that presume universal internet anticipation of your new project.

16) Teasing tweets
If you have exciting news, tell us. The otherwise wonderful Stephen Fry is among the worst for teasing his followers with hints of confidential information - the Twitter equivalent of giving the world a glimpse of your stockings. Shortly before Gordon Brown apologised for the treatment of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, following a campaign supported by the broadcaster, Fry tweeted:

"A little bird has whispered that in 1 hour there may be good news emanating from a certain quarter on a certain subject. My lips are sealed."

Oh, COME ON.

17) Too many tweets
If you think you might have Twit-horrea, try deleting two out of every three tweets before pressing update. Increase this to three out of three if you've been drinking.

18) Failure to hat-tip
All it takes is a RT or a (via), and your followers can learn where you found the good stuff. It's just polite.

19) Simple factual questions
Ask Google.

20) Prolonged sporting tweets
Twitter can become an unbearable place on Saturday afternoons. "1-0", "1-1", "Just wide!" and "Diouf you t***" do not make for an exciting Twitter stream. The person sitting next to you at the game might be interested in your opinion, but the majority of your followers who have never even been to Blackburn can manage just fine without the live text commentary.

• The author is @mattkmoore on Twitter. He regularly breaks rules 1, 2 and 20.