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“RT” vs “via”. Round 2.

January 22, 2009

“RT” wins for retweets. Hands down, game over, that’s it. It is by far the most common format. If your Twitter client has a “Retweet” button, this is the format it should conform to:


RT @username: the message

Whether or not there should be a colon following @username is still up for debate. (I think there should be, Twitter character-count-nazis be damned). And if your Twitter client has a retweet button, don’t give users a formatting option. Standardize.

That is the format for retweets. So, Tweetie will adopt this “standard”? Well, not exactly. Read on.

What I found recently is that “RT” and “via” don’t mean the same thing. “RT” is typically used for verbatim retweets, sort of like the equivalent of “Fwd” for those chain emails your grandmother still sends you where Bill Gates will pay you money if you forward it to 10 people. “via” on the other hand is used when you want to add your own context to some existing tweet while attributing it to the original author.

I would argue that original content is far more valuable to the twitter community than RT spam. Craig Hockenberry nails it in this tweet.

So, what about Tweetie? I can already hear most of you screaming at me. Tweetie currently has a button called “Repost Tweet” that makes it easy to create “via” style posts. Because “via” and “RT” mean different things, perhaps there should be two buttons… one for “mentioning” a tweet (via) and one for “forwarding” a tweet (RT).

My problem is that I HATE adding UI clutter. Adding another button for what seems like a petty detail (to non-twitter-geeks) is the wrong thing to do.

Adding a setting to switch between the two (depending on which you use more) is just as crappy. First of all, if you use “RT” a lot, stop spamming people. If you read an interesting tweet, at least think… why would my followers care… Then reference the interesting tweet and mention why it’s interesting! Your followers can easily see which tweet you were referring to (because Tweetie sets the in_reply_to_status_id attribute - allowing reply-chain navigation), and you don’t even have to quote the full text.

So what is going to change in Tweetie? Right now, nothing. If I can think of a clean, uncluttered way to let you choose to “RT”, I’ll implement it in Tweetie. In the meantime, you’ll have to continue to modify the text manually. Just tap “Repost tweet”, delete the “via” and put “RT” in the front yourself. Perhaps the extra work might encourage you to come up with some original thoughts.

Side note: I don’t remember where I saw it, but “♺” is a terrible idea for indicating retweets. It has the same problem as “RT” in the sense that newbies can’t figure out what it means. It’s impossible to type. It’s a *recycle* symbol (what does this have to do with *retweet*?). And it doesn’t show up on the iPhone (granted, that should be considered an iPhone bug).

(Continued from “RT” vs “via”. Round 1)

Update: You can argue with me, but it’s tough to argue with Him.