Are tweets practically a direct message?

[john]

It shows up in their notifications that you wrote their name in your tweet, and then they can either reply or ignore it. Usually famous people ignore those kind of tweets, especially if a lot of people send them tweets. Some famous people will reply though, it all depends. But the difference between a tweet and a DM is that everyone can see the tweet, and the DM goes to only that account where only they can see it.