On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 10:00:30AM +0100, Paul Kinlan wrote:
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. Â 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
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. Â Again,
RT's are a user concept, and is very easy for them not use.
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. Â The
great thing about a RT is that I just hit reply and type RT at the
front.
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.
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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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.Â
I agree on everything Paul Kinlan here so clearly expressed.
+1 to enhancing the replies and favs first.
--
|
: Marteen
|
: CA49 DEE9 7F5B A373 5121 2F82 1047 1BB9 83EC D3C9
|__
