Twitter Announces A Retweeting API

It matters for analytics and tools that would like to have a structured wrapper around the data. Also, small changes to @replies like in_reply_to explicitly stated matter a lot for how structured that data is.

Also, number of retweets and likes is more important than number of followers for authority measurement.

I think it will be neat to see the most retweeted content from your friends and reduce the noise and let people disable it if they like.

That's the sort of thing I'll think we will do on friendbinder with it.

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

The big deal here is that Twitter will get a better idea of what tweets are of "higher quality" or "importance" (both of those terms are questionable). I imagine they'll start bubbling up RT's on some RT or use it for trending.

1. 50% people still probably use web interface, and they don't have easier way of retweeting tweets. They need to copy & paste and that's a big usability hassle.

2. Cleaner stream

3. And other most imp. part - data-mining about finding which activity is retweeted most number of times and discovering popular tweets.

It will mean you can always RT a full tweet, instead of often having to cut off part of it to get it to still fit within 140 characters once you've added the "RT @soandso"

Often retweets contains links to things that matter, or ideas that should be spread, or funny things. It's the same reason people quote and link on blogs etc.

To share good content from people you follow to your followers

Sometimes someone says something that you might agree with, or you think your followers might agree with it, so you RT.

retweets are a community attempt to make up for the fact that "favoriting" something on twitter is largely ignored and hidden and isn't (or at least wasn't traditionally) something easily accessible from the website or as part of someone's regular list of tweets. Favorites are more accessible now to other people, but they don't have the prominence that they should have.

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.

For the same reasons you might link to some other website from your blog, or submit a link here.

You retweet because you want to say what someone else said.

With my startup, our stories are retweeted 50-100 times a day. They're retweeted because our followers want to share the news they got from us with their own followers.

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!