I share your disappointment. Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan, and I investigated retweeting practices in the spring and summer and found a whole plethora of different practices that are not supported by this implementation. We wrote this up in a HICSS paper that will be published and presented in January, but we've made a draft version available for those who want to know more about retweeting: Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter danah boyd, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan HICSS 2010 http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf Enjoy! danah On Nov 11, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:
RE: Why Retweet works the way it does
http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html <BY: Evan Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, of which he is currently CEO.>
I think it's interesting that Ev <creator of Twitter> misses the most valued function of the retweet <to this user>, which is the linkage between the retweeter and the original author of the RT tweet - the creator of Twitter's new modification of retweet removes the citation factor - The current Twitter syntax of say, Richard Smith retweeting something about surveillance and blogging makes me follow a link about say, blogging, precisely because Richard Smith is citing it. For the URL simply to appear in my InBox from ZX would be meaningless. This is a good example of where a tool designer fails to talk to users about what is good about the actual design and what would then, be lost in the supposed "improvement".
Mary -- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Professor and Director, Network of Centers and Institutes in Education (NCIE) & Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry (CCFI), Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia Archive: http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson
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------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ @zephoria