Ask HN: We just launched PleaseRT.me, a Twitter-app, please send feedback | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: We just launched PleaseRT.me, a Twitter-app, please send feedback

pleasert.me

15 pointsMazy19 comments

(Putting my normal user hat on here. I'm purposely preventing myself from trying to think hard on the purpose of your site.)

"I" don't follow what your site does, even after I see the example. Something to do with retweets, which I thought was just sending someone else's tweet to my friends. But I enter some text and submit, nothing seems to happen. I alt-tab away and come back and a username/password field has appeared, with an empty text box and "60" number. I don't get it.

I give up, feeling dumb, and leave the site, to do whatever it was I was doing before.

So it's a text box that creates links that, when clicked, send you over to twitter where you can click submit to turn them into spam?

That suggests two groups of users: Spammers to post links, and, uh... stooges to click links. I can see the motivation for the spammers. What exactly is the motivation for people to come to this site and click links?

It just doesn't make any sense at all.

retweeting is something already done by the twitter community. At the moment if you have something that you want to encourage your followers to spread, the most you can do is say "Please Retweet!" (which a lot of people do - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=please+retweet ). We are just trying to make an action that people already do, easier.

I love the design it's great.

What problem are you trying to solve exactly?

Retweeting is something the twitter community has invented; there is still no built in functionality for it. As more and more people sign up for twitter, they have to continuously be educated on what retweeting is and how to do it. We are trying to make retweeting easier.

Fair enough, why don't you create some variation of twitterpedia.com and put a lot more definitions on there?

The way we did it makes it more useful for the whole community, and helps ideas spread through twitter. It lowers the friction to retweet. Also, most users are not likely to go to a twitterpedia site, pleaseRT.me is viral by definition, and gets the idea right in their face.

Perhaps you could explain (on the site) what retweeting is and why it would make ones life better to engage in it. Perhaps you could also explain it to us here.

We will definitely be putting an explanation on the site. A good explanation can be found here: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_retweet

Basically, when you see someone tweet something you find interesting, something you'd like to share with your friends/followers, you copy and paste their message, and usually put RT @username at the beginning. This helps ideas spread through twitter. We're taking away the need to copy + paste, and putting the retweet request in the URL itself to help with the 140 character limit.

I'd love twitterific integration.

Umm maybe you could create a dashboard widget (or desktop gadget for vista) - then I'd consider heavy use. Until then I think I will only use it when I REALLY want people to RT something.

pleaseRT.com is too long. What about rt.me ? It's available and then your URLs would be a lot shorter.

I don't think it's possible to register a 2-letter .me

Hm. Ok seems you are right but plzrt.me or whatever something that's as concise as possible.

who else thought that this was going to be a rate my picture type site?

I would pay money for a button which, when I saw someone retweeting, I could press it and that person would experience an electro-convulsive shock.

I think the existence of your app makes the world a worse place. Please take it down.

How about, instead of just modding me down, you explain why this app serves a useful purpose?

If I had to guess (which I do), I'd say you were down-modded due to the way you expressed your opinion, not that anyone necessarily disagrees with you...

I was thinking the same thing. I wish re-tweeting verbatim would go away.

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