(twitter) ReTweet dilemna
I’m fully in the Twitter cult now, even though I may have been dragged in kicking and screaming, I like tumblr but the conversation ability of Twitter really takes things to a level above blogging…
I’m still working on http://tweetbe.at/ , which has solved a lot of the ‘noise’ problem that I had on twitter - but it’s been challenging work given the limitations of twitter’s API and the problems inherent in writing a web application in pure javascript without any server code.
Now twitter is throwing a curveball at me where they want to own the ‘retweet’ and make it an official part of twitter.
To me this is pretty significant because it’s the first feature where twitter is introducing something that is impossible to do with an SMS. I don’t really count replies because you can still reply over SMS, it just wont’ provide a link back - but retweeting won’t be something you can do on your standard cell phone.
My issue with this feature though is more in that they are messing up the way I use Twitter. When I retweet I add info! If I retweet someone I add something like ‘cool’ or ‘this sucks’. I sometimes credit multiple people, or a chain of people. I sometimes alter the message to make it more readable or relevant.
In the future, this will not be possible, retweets will only be an identical copy of the original message and un-alterable. They won’t credit who you heard it from, they will credit who originally said it.
Of course I can just keep doing things the same old way: just post a copy of someone’s message and add “RT” to it. All I will lose is the metadata with the id of the original message.
My dilemna is that it confuses my twitter tool: do I keep the RT functionality that copies a message for you, or do I add a new RT functionality that doesn’t copy anything and just adds a pointer to your stream?
The answer might be to let you choose to edit a retweet which then disables the ‘official’ support, but it sounds a little clunky to me.
