Early developer preview: Retweeting API

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17 points·merrick33··6 comments

"It was important for us that retweets are easily differentiated visually from regular tweets."

This stems from a misreading of why people retweet stuff. People retweet stuff because someone else said something they'd like to say themselves. Adding the RT: @source is a concession to good manners and etiquette. If every retweet someone sends is marked as "unoriginal content" I can see the number of things retweeted in general take a nosedive. Who wants to be exposed as a conduit for other people's ideas?

Maybe people sometimes want the status from being associated with someone famous. People also unabashedly like quotes, as well as being part of a movement. So I'm not sure if RTing will go down.

Are you giving your own opinion on the matter or is this something mentioned by the Twitter Dev team?

The quoted sentence above is from the documentation linked here.

"I can see the number of things retweeted in general take a nosedive."

This would not be a bad thing.

Kudos to the API team for letting developers in on the new API features.

Not to go on a rant but working with the Twitter API restore sanity I lost back when I worked with Facebook's "thing". I don't even want to call it an API, whatever it was.

When designing API checkout "The Little Manual of API Design by Jasmin Blanchette’s" http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf I can't recommend it enough.

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