Hi Guys,
When I saw the original message stating that the retweet API I was about to
say straight away that I despise the idea, but I thought I would refrain -
give it some thought. I still despise the idea and I have to make it known
the reasons why I think it is a very very bad idea and in the long term will
negatively affect Twitter as a communications platform for the future.
1. You are embedding a user developed based meme into the Twitter
infrastructure - the popularity of RT itself may wane after some point.
Users are very fickle, they change their minds, take a stand and don't
listen to them - you know your platform and I am pretty sure you know that
this is a bit of a hack. Let users use they system how they want, they will
evolve how they use it, constraints via an API
1. Twitter already has the capability to do smarter things
that completely negate the need for this API if they just change
the current
API a little
2. Not every app will use RT API (especially legacy ones) and not every
user will use it and as such Twitter and this list will get lots of
questions why certain RT's are accessible by the retweet API. Again, RT's
are a user concept, and is very easy for them not use.
3. Whilst I use TweetDeck, I really dislike the amount of utility buttons
it has and the amount of options it has - introducing another API for
another function is tantamount to the same thing, you are asking us app
developers to include more options in our apps. The great thing about a RT
is that I just hit reply and type RT at the front.
4. A big thing that people have requested is that quite often there is
not any room in the very limited 140 characters to add comment to a retweet,
this doesn't seem to solve that problem.
5. Authority of a user based on a RT and credit to the originator is a
misnomer, no one actually needs it, very very few people care about - and
when they do care about not getting the credit for the original tweet you
have to ask why do they care? and why should we care? again it is still very
easy to bypass. If you have a problem with it, as per the Twitter TOS you
are the copyright holder of your content.
My honest vote is not to pollute the Twitter API with a special RT
capability, rather:
- Enhance Favorites and the favorites API, allow me to get a list of
everyone's favorites, allow me to see a list of people who favorited a
tweet. If you look at the proposal for RT API it is doing something similar
to this. The entire UX for Favorites makes a lot more sense than retweet -
infact you can go as far as saying if you like something favorite (star) it,
if you really like your favorite - Forward (RT).
- Allow me to get a list of a users favorites (similar to the "Likes"
feed in FriendFeed) - this type of concept is so powerful, I can discover
people who share very similar likes. I can also do Best of Day
very easily
- Enhance in_reply_to, allow me to see all tweets that reply to this
tweet in an object returned by the current api ( that is so I don't have to
keep re-querying the search API), further more allow me to request N levels
deep of replies to a given tweet (yes this is similar to threaded comments)
So by enhancing Replies and favorites you can remove the need for special RT
API because you can combine both parts of the API to get at the originator
of a popular tweet, have notification and visual queues of popular tweets.
thus keeping the twitter API simple.
Paul - grumpy - Kinlan
http://twitter.com/PaulKinlan
