September 2009

Thank the heavens, this retweet thing was driving me insane!

I never understood why people re-tweeted posts or tweets from popular accounts. Take this for an example, I follow Mashable and so do 1.4 million other people.

If you follow me, and I follow you, and we don’t know each other, chances are we both share a common interest. Lets say that common interest is Technology or Social Media (hate that word).

Because I follow people who share the same interests as me, chances are your going to retweet something a hundred people have already re-tweeted, affectively spamming my twitter stream to shit.

Here’s Twitter’s official explanation of the new feature:

One of the main confusions and criticisms about the retweet API was around what happens when a given tweet is retweeted multiple times. The explanation was that developers need to do their own retweet collapsing. If N people retweet a given tweet, you’d get N instances of that same tweet in the appropriate retweet timeline and the home timeline. You would then have to do your own internal book keeping about whether that tweet had already come in. If it hadn’t you’d display it for the first time. If it had you’d update the already displayed tweet.

Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated and confusing. We’re not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it.

Looks pretty cool from the screenshot, hopefully they’ll get this going pretty sharpish.