I think the new RT API is an attempt to turn related tweets into a computer-parseable conversation. Humans can fairly easily determine what it part of an existing conversation by reading the different tweets and using contextual clues, but computers cannot.
The small benefit to us humans is that clients may be more able to present tweets as a threaded conversation if they understand that discreet tweets are, in fact, part of a conversation. The large benefit to Twitter and corporations is that they can more easily track social behavioral patterns (== more finely targeted marketing and advertising and ROI calculations). Fortunately, it's all opt-in. Unfortunately, it's all opt-in. I'm with the others, though, that IMHO retweets should not be deleted if an original retweet (or one up in the chain? dunno) is deleted. Possibly it's only in there because this (having "gaps" in tweets brought about by deleted tweets) breaks the programmatic ability to follow a thread. Not sure. Joseph Cheek jos...@cheek.com, www.cheek.com twitter: http://twitter.com/cheekdotcom Cameron Kaiser wrote: > Still, I'm sort of with Dewald and others that I'm really having a hard > time seeing what the RT API buys, and I can see quite a few things that the > old "manual" way does better. > >
