Martin Petts

In the UK, what legislative appointments are made by the Crown, Parliament and the Prime Minister?

Rethinking the Retweet

One of the amazing things about Twitter is how the community has taken a lead role in developing new features for the service. Its the ultimate expression of the company’s incredible organic growth that Twitter has been able to sit back and watch as the world shows them what features they want to see.

With that knowledge Twitter came up with the retweet function for its own API at the end of 2009. However, the Twitter retweet differs significantly from the one that grew organically and was implemented in various Twitter browsers. Whereas the convention was that the tweet to  be repeated would be copied and pasted and prefixed with ‘RT’ and the original user’s handle, Twitter has simplified the process and increased its usability. A retweeted tweet now appears to come from the original poster, with your connection to the tweet, ie your Twitter friend who reposted it, below. This has caused some controversy, but in my opinion makes the whole thing much clearer.

The problem is that so far Twitter apps and browsers have been slow to catch on to the new way of retweeting and continue to adopt the many organically derived ‘standards’. For companies looking to use Twitter as a marketing tool, however, there are clear benefits to the official Twitter way of retweeting. For one, your message appears unadulterated, without any extra message being added along the way. This is important as we’ve only got 140 characters to play with after all. By appearing as the source of the Tweet it reinforces your ownership and your branding on your message. If you have something that manages to go viral, you want to gain maximum impact for your brand from it.

All this has led me to think carefully about Twitter integration for a new Content Management System I am working on. Obviously to retweet you need to tweet in the first place, so the new system will tweet about an article when its published, remember the id of the tweet and then use this id to retweet via the Twitter API.

Current limitations seem to be that I can’t include an accurate count of the number of retweets in the way that Tweetmeme does, but I believe this will change soon as the API indicates that this is on the way.