New Twitter RT Link: Be Cautious
For those of you who are in the Twitter “retweet” beta test, I have a word of advice: proceed cautiously.
Here’s why. Currently, retweets that are executed via the Twitter web “retweet link” are visible to your followers who are using the web interface to read your tweets but are not visible to popular third party clients.
Let me say that a different way: popular third party applications are currently not displaying RTs executed via the Twitter web interface “retweet” link. In other words, these retweets are MIA in a follower’s timeline in popular third-party clients. The exception: Tweetie2.
This may be a “cart before the horse” problem. In other words, third party applications may not have had a chance to integrate the new API. Or it may be that Twitter privileged Tweetie2 developers. I don’t know.
But if most of your followers read your tweets using third party desktop clients, this “bug” could have a serious impact on your personal retweet rate in the short-term. Experiment wisely. And mindfully.
See the story in pictures on WiredPen.
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2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Melissa
wow – thank you for the FYI – I always wondered why Twitter hadn’t adopted the “Retweet” button a la TweetDeck etc — and then today, voila! But I did notice the small disclaimer, although not really as clear as you make it here.
I’d be interested in starting a group on improving Twitter — what else would help us pass along or aggregate info like Hashtag or Retweet?
What I love most about Twitter is that the users are the ones who came up with the RT and the # functions — not the initial Twitter creators.
Nov 11th, 2009
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