Beier, But you can up vote a tweet you like by favoriting it - it is just that favoriting is very very underused - so much so that a lot of clients don't seem to support it. A RT is about injecting something you like into your followers feeds because you think it will be of value to them. It has a slightly different meaning. This is partly the reason why I suggest that they make overhaul the favoritng at a minimum, so for a given tweet you can see who favorites it, and seperate out re-tweets.
The issue with favorites is that are personal to a user and a tweet so are not visible in the UI to everyone else (which is something that the RT seems to be trying to solve), and also track re-tweets as they are two different things. You can get a users favorites pretty easily. Paul 2009/8/17 Beier <beier...@gmail.com> > > Much agreed with Chris. I think the reason people use RT differently > (resend original message, add + comment or - comment) is because of > the fact that Twitter never standardized RT. Sometimes user changes > the text randomly for the shear reason the msg is over 140. I'm not > saying Twitter should change user behavior, no they are not. The new > API doesn't stop user sending customized RTs. But it does standardize > one thing, you can "vote up" for a tweet you like, and this is much > needed for data mining. for example previously tracking RTs per tweet > is easy, but tracking RTs per Twitter account is very hard and almost > impossible, this new implementation makes it possible. it turns RT > from unorganized data into organized and makes the data more useful > for data miners. It's not perfect, but it will evolve as time goes on. > > On Aug 17, 3:56 am, Chris Babcock <cbabc...@asciiking.com> wrote: > > On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:43:50 -0700 (PDT) > > > > janole <s...@mobileways.de> wrote: > > > If you just don't agree with a tweet and want to express it via a > > > retweet, how can you do so with the proposed API? Seems to be > > > impossible or am I missing something? > > > > The new retweet API does not circumvent any of the current methods of > > expression. The only thing that it does is provide a method for > > verbatim retweets that is appropriate on social, semantic and data > > storage levels. It doesn't appear to be designed to handled "value > > added" retweets. There's no reason that it should be. That mode of > > expression is already served well enough by emergent behavior > > surrounding the current API. Value added re-expression is an evolving > > part of the Twitter experience. Codifying the current meme for that > > expression would be counter-productive. This API is not attempting to > > do that. It's only a provision for a meaningful, trackable, acceptable > > "me too" message. > > > > So to discuss a post with which a user disagrees, the retweet mechanism > > would *not* be used. That is a value added expression that would be best > > served by linking or replying, depending on the scope of the > > disagreement. > > > > Chris >