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June 30, 2009
Twitter retweet thoughts
I think i have been using twitter for over two years now so i think i pretty much know it well.
But lately i have been bugged up with retweets. Here is a small "thinking out loud" about it. Please contribute!
A twitter retweet is the action of resending or sharing a message that appears on your personal timeline to your followers.
It's unsupported officially by twitter but it is pretty much used by everyone.
Retweets (aka RT) should (IMO) be officially supported by twitter and provide somekind of "conversation thread" view.
The other day a very well known public person here in Perú sent an open thought via his twitter account. His followers started RT'ing it but since twitter limits messages to 140 characters the message didn't come complete.
He then received a lot of criticism about his message and he was then forced to write a public explanation of how his message was truncated and therefore expresed his thought incorrectly.
See? This is the problem with RT's. If you don't follow the RT'ed person you won't be 100% sure the message you are reading is his true collaboration.
RT's should include a link to the current message being shared and twitter clients should use that link to create a "conversation thread" where users could see the real tweet.
This is dangerous!
For example, someone could send a RT saying that i'm currently drunk at the office. Twitter users could confirm this by visiting my twitter account but what if my account is restricted? Also, how many users will actually confirm it?
Also, if you send a reply to a user you are aware that it will be seen by the intendent user and also by the users who follow both the sender and the receiver.
Is correct to RT that? IMO it is not. When you retweet you make that specific message appear on the public twitter timeline. It's like shouting out loud what someone just said to you and your group of friends in common.
When is ok to RT a message? For me it is ok to retweet a message when it is not a direct message or a @reply message and that the user doesn't have his timeline restricted. A lot of work just to retweet a message, right? This is why i think this should be supported and resolved by twitter.
And to finish this post... come on! Use the RT form and not "ReTweet" or "via" forms.
"Retweet" is just too long and the "via" it's confusing since it's at the end of the message. It may confuse some users.
Thoughts?
--fernando
BTW, follow me @fernandoflorez i tweet in both spanish and english ;)
RT @fernandoflorez I'm drunk at the office and making a nuisance of myself.
Hey, you make a point. If the tweet-reader doesn't verify the information (and who has time these days) there could quickly be misinformation and slander against another person. Since twitter doesn't make it very easy to read all tweets by a user since the beginning of time, it could even be prohibitive to verify the information.
Very thought provoking.
DW
Gracias por la info. Esta buena.
I was curious about RT etiquette the other day. The entry that I was trying to retweet was >140 and I was feeling guilty for editing the content to make it fit. I agree that a solution that linked to the original post would be safer and more effective. Especially if I wanna back out of what you retweeted- so u can come back and see my repaired version.