
Twitter Announces A Retweeting API - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/twitter-announces-a-retweeting-api/
======
andreyf
About time? FriendFeed has always kicked Twitter's ass iterating on features,
and with access to Facebook's 300 million users this is just "too little, too
late" for Twitter.

------
aditya
Why is this such a Big DealTM? @replies becoming a part of the API were a big
deal because you could follow the conversation thread using them, RTs don't
really have any other context and we're already doing pretty well reposting a
tweet with RT <nickname> in front of it.

The only important ramification I can now see is that it will become easier to
track what content is being spread from person-to-person without having to
rely on searching for "RT" or "via"...

~~~
wmf
I've seen "retweet storms" where my timeline is clogged with duplicate
retweets; hopefully this feature will eliminate that.

------
alexbosworth
I often like to add a little note to my RT to say what I think about it,
hopefully the API is just a flag and I can still do this and be compatible
with the system.

------
johns
The bad: I think it will result in even more retweets. The nice: No duplicate
RTs. The good: It will be a lot easier to filter them out completely.

------
sound2man
Could someone explain why you would want to retweet? I am not a regular user
of twitter, but it would seem to me that retweeting just adds to the noise.
Aren't you supposed to tweet original stuff, or is it all about trying to get
a topic to trend?

~~~
derefr
Retweeting is bridging the graph with an enticing edge to follow. If Twitter
was a purely social network (without the information flow), the practice would
reduce to name-dropping.

------
figital
Can't they just extract the entire original message for redisplay out of a
shorter URL like this: "hey check this out: <http://bit.ly/anKad> ?

That link ... <http://twitter.com/jonpierce/status/3293845360> ... is easy for
any client (and twitter) to grep.

~~~
figital
Any idea why I would get docked for a comment like this? I thought this might
be a solution that required the least amount of work with the greatest
possible functionality. I'm not knocking the dock, I'd just like feedback for
future posting etiquette. Thanks!

