Twitter has had retweeting since it began.  Sure it’s only been formalized over the last year.  Lots of the clients didn’t incorporate retweet(RT) behavior selections until recently. But soon that may all be for naught.

Twitter staff are hard at work designing in retweet functionality.  That’s right. The age of RT @name may soon be replaced by a little symbol and the Twitter user name doing the retweet.

Here’s what they have to say about why:

Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.

But what will it look like?

hand sketch of what Twitter retweet might look like

The short explanation:

Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You’d see @ev’s tweet even though you don’t follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (The star, reply, and retweet options only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don’t see them all the time.) Also, if you find my retweets annoying, then you’ll be able to turn them off.

Seems like a long overdue feature based on current usage of the retweet. Lots of folks are going to love this, especially the folks writing clients. No more copy/paste/prefix etc.

Pros

• Easy to understand
• Easy to use
• Provides visibility to who originally tweeted and who is retweeting
• Preserves the chain of original person tweeting and follow on retweeters

Cons

• Easy to use – what I envision is folks that would have thought twice about retweeting something will no only have to click a button and go. No complexity = easy spamming.
• Loss of visibility to who is retweeting.  This sounds contradictory to the visibility pro listed above but it’s something different.  As it stands now, you’d see a retweet as a tweet by me for example and then the retweeted text.  In the future state, my name would appear in small text and though visible would be easy to ignore.
• Customization might decrease.  Currently each client can choose their own way to handle inserting retweets.  With the API option, it seems likely that client creators may opt to use the built  in functionality instead of something creative.

Either way, I welcome it as something new and hopefully something that brings more folks in that were put off by the whole concept of a retweet. No more confusion about who posted the original is a big plus for folks protective of their Twitter stream.

Cheers @ev and @biz.

BTW, I’m @tojosan on Twitter.

Chris Brogan is someone I trust. So when he says I can do a better job at putting up tweets that folks will retweet, I tend to believe him. Beyond that, I’m on the same page already with him on most of his suggestions.

A few ones he gives as bonus suggestions to get retweeted are:

• Retweet other people and promote other people 15x to every 1 time of your effort.
• Don’t tweet every damned thing you write about or do. Folks will fatigue quickly.
• Befriend and add value to the best retweeters. It’s a live network, a human network, a give-and-take relationship.

To me, the last one is one folks think they’ve already got covered. Often though, they will see a retweet and be following the retweeter instead of the original source. Trust me, you’ll miss out that way. What folks retweet is in two camps; they retweet every stray link from their friends, or they are very picky about what they retweet.

Find original sources, follow them, and do a fair amount of retweeting of their links and such. You’ll find it brings them into your fold. If it doesn’t, no problem, you’re still sharing good stuff.

Another tip to consider on making your posts up for retweet is to link directly to things. Folks will stop clicking your links if you always link to the home page for a blog but mention a specific post. Link to that specific post.

Same thing goes for telling folks that the link you’re sharing is a video. It’s not near as important to say it’s on YouTube or Vimeo, just say it’s video. Where I work, they ding you for streaming video.

Go in peace, share good stuff, and check out Chris’s original article.

Screenshot of Seesmic Twitter client

There’s a movement going on to encourage Twitter to add retweet functionality. It’s already garnered thousands of votes. Here’s the basic statement from the ‘official’ site, retweet.com.

Retweeting has become an essential part of the Twitter experience. Our goal is to start an online revolution. Help us show Twitter.com that thousands of us would like this feature. Make your voice count by signing the public petition!

Is built in retweeting really a revolution? Many Twitter clients already include retweeting. Sure, there’s no API call for it provided by Twitter, but it’s a very simple text formatting step. If you can code a Twitter client, coding retweets is the easy part.

I’ll contend though that retweets is not only not a needed base function in Twitter, but it’s already an overused tool. Here’s a perfect example of why.

well, duh! RT @kmallan RT @buymyshirt: Express your support for Medical #Marijuana #420 #cannabis http://bit.ly/1nWwM (Please RT)

WTH? Who originally tweeted this? Do I even care who originally shared it? Will anyone? Isn’t it all about the content, not the sharer?

Here’s another example:

RT: @00k: RT @unifex @rasmus I love Windows users – http://bugs.php.net/48139

This time not only is it a double retweet, the original receiver is included as well. I’m confident that information isn’t even relevant to any of us receiving this tweet. That’s especially likely after two retweets.

My counter proposition is the use of freetweeting. Freetweeting would be the uncredited re-tweeting of something you find on Twitter. Often times when I share a link, I’m not as interested in getting credit for sharing as I am that the link gets shared. Likewise with a quote. It’s not about me, it’s about the content. It might even specifically be about the person who created the content.

In order to implement this no special software or tools are required, simply copy and paste the tweet back into the post window. To further make this obvious to use freetweeting vs retweeting, the original poster could tag the post FT. This would indicate folks should just copy and go. That person could optionally include the FT or not.

Twitter culture would obviously break down into two groups, those that FT tag and those that won’t. My hope would be that in either case they just don’t use RT @tojosan for something I’ve shared as FT.

What do you think? Would you support this movement? Would you be willing to lose credit in exchange for clearer content? Easier to read tweets?

Are you with me?! Wanna start freetweet.com?

Dave Winer, one of the longest lived folks on line, is bringing a new facet to link love, 40-twits. 40-twits is simple. It’s the last 40 links that Dave shared on Twitter ranked in order of the number of times they’ve been clicked through to. (say that three times fast)

Not much to look at from the clip but it’s not much to look at on the 40-twits page either. The value isn’t in the colors or the pretty looks but in what it shares. The columns include the link title, what site the link is to, the age in hours of the link, and finally the number of clicks.

This page is updated every five minutes via a script, and it only covers links created with tr.im. That URL shortening service provides an API to gather data about links visit through the short URL.

As with any URL shortener, this is a risky proposition to base a long term service on.

I look forward to perhaps using something like this myself. I’m defaulting all of my URL shortens to tr.im for the time being.

Give it a look. Try it out yourself. Let me know what you think.

Todd/tojosan