Friday, August 14, 2009

Retweeting Is Cheating, Thread The Conversation

RetweetImage by Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr
Retweeting has emerged as a popular method of sharing with your followers, to retweet is to repeat/quote someones tweet. Although popular it's not something that I participate, largely because I feel it's lazy, doesn't extend conversation and it's like an alternative form of Chinese whispers.

I know there are arguments for/against retweeting and I acknowledge that there are limitations with the 140 character format. Introducing Phase one of project retweet which is Twitter's attempt to make retweeting part of the infrastructure. I understand the principle, displaying the original tweet in the timeline; provides the source, original (unedited) tweet and our @username as the retweet.

I just feel that Twitter should concentrate on other aspects, threaded conversation is what I want introduced as I want to be a part of a global discussion not an empty echo chamber. The conversation on Twitter isn't threaded, Friendfeed became popular as it fixed this, grouping discussion around tweets and the community identified the rich content. Robert Scoble recently started favouriting tweets to share with his followers and it's clear that the community are looking for better tools to filter the value but can Twitter provide the solution? Answers in 140 characters and no retweeting..




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