Twitter Retweets: Why do some people use "via" instead of "RT?" #HowTwitterWorks

Many folks on Twitter have explained this very well, so I have quoted their guidance here read more...

Read more!

How important are you to your Twitter followers?

Ever wonder how many people on Twitter would recommend you if given the chance? Now that Twitter lists are here I decided to find out.

I calculated "popularity" by dividing the number of lists an account was on by the number of followers it has. Those shown first have been placed on the most lists as a percentage of their total followers. (The two highlighted accounts are two of my Twitter accounts).

I tried to compare a variety of types of accounts, using the Twitalyzer 100 list and some well-known names in different industries as a source.

Account	Ratio	followers	lists
arrington	3.808%	16,808	640
ginatrapani	2.738%	28,124	770
Danny Sullivan	2.375%	21,092	501
davewiner	2.137%	25,920	554
parislemon	2.114%	12,533	265
scobleizer	1.886%	100,823	1,902
BrianSolis	1.660%	35,836	595
DrWayneWDyer	1.543%	31,812	491
chrisbrogan	1.348%	105,527	1,423
mayhemstudios	1.233%	36,727	453
GuyKawasaki	1.209%	186,794	2,258
shitmydadsays	1.019%	646,791	6,589
cheth	0.928%	29,425	273
jason_pollock	0.789%	66,398	524
buzzedition	0.786%	44,936	353
alyssa_milano	0.775%	316,048	2,448
Twitter_Tips	0.661%	141,731	937
StephenFry	0.527%	921,469	4,857
Classical_Music	0.463%	9,723	45
revrunwisdom	0.432%	411,161	1,775
zaibatsu	0.427%	99,679	426
Mashable	0.357%	1,677,784	5,982
BarackObama	0.336%	2,549,802	8,574
techcrunch	0.289%	1,102,277	3,185
google	0.270%	1,824,938	4,935
perezhilton	0.257%	1,582,109	4,073
wilw	0.236%	1,436,010	3,394
KevinRose	0.231%	1,165,038	2,692
nytimes	0.200%	2,038,344	4,073
CreativityBoost	0.195%	19,468	38
LaughItUp	0.168%	33,899	57
the_real_shaq	0.164%	2,479,829	4,060
britneyspears	0.150%	3,658,780	5,505
ev	0.146%	1,176,533	1,719
aplusk	0.143%	3,906,386	5,603
GaryVee	0.125%	851,109	1,068
iamdiddy	0.104%	2,188,900	2,278
Sween	0.089%	1,028,063	911
biz	0.082%	1,454,232	1,194
jack	0.057%	1,407,798	797

What's YOUR Twitter ratio?

Read more!

Twitter is just stupid, pointless hype?

So many clueless people, so little time... Recently,  Patrick Kershaw wrote an article about the valuelessness of Twitter. An excerpt:

"Consider Twitter…I am unable to see the benefit on even a personal level. I am not a celebrity-watcher, nor do I care what others are doing every minute of their lives. So is any value added at all? I don't think so.…If you cannot see a benefit, don't follow the hype."

Too many journalists have been doing no research on how Twitter is actually used

While Patrick (not a journalist) also made some points about how he feels social networks can be used, many journalists don't even bother. They just direct withering criticism at people who use a communications medium to tell others what they are doing.

Never mind that Twitter can be used to communicate anything; the fact that a few people use it in ways they think they never would means it must be worthless for everyone. Never mind actually researching what you are writing about and finding out what people are actually doing; stick to simple stereotypes.

A journalist's time saver: A pre-written article about pointless fads like Twitter

So in the interest of saving everyone time, I have created a template to assist busy journalists not interested in doing their own research. Simply copy the article below and publish it as your own writing:

Dear readers,

I, an important journalist, want to tell you that Twitter is just stupid, pointless hype because I heard that someone once used it to write what they were having for breakfast. I promise I will never use Twitter.

These things are so easy to spot for someone as smart as me. In fact, yesterday, I saw someone in the grocery store talking about cereal on their mobile phone! Anything you would use to talk about cereal is just hype. No phones for me.

I really can pick 'em, can't I? Someone told me the other day my articles are now being published on the internet. Do you realize the internet is full of pages of funny cat pictures? Another pointless, flash-in-the-pan medium.

It seems like there are a lot of stupid things that will be going away soon. My friend told me people sometimes get offensive messages from people they don't know by email. Clearly only morons use email.

Here's one that made me laugh: I saw someone in the park holding a stupid picture up to their face. Another moronic trend. Attached to the back were hundreds of pages with letters printed on them—all about that dumb picture! Books are unbelievably stupid.

And I can't believe you've overlooked the dumbest fad of all: Why haven't more people noticed—as I have—that other people are always saying stupid things? People are pointless.

That's why I live in a cave.

Communicating is just stupid, pointless hype.

The article beginning "Dear readers" is offered free of copyright under an Uncreative Morons license.

Read more!

What are the most essential Twitter apps ever created?

OneForty looks like the best site yet to provide a categorized list of Twitter Apps.

While OneForty requires an invitation to join and so is not available to everyone yet, I wanted to provide what I think is one of it's most valuable features to the general user: a "best of" list of apps organized by category they call "essentials."

What do you think? Are these the  most essential Twitter apps out there? Here's their list as of late September, 2009:

Desktop

• TweetDeck

• Tweetie for Mac

• Twitterrific

• Seesmic Desktop

• DestroyTwitter

• Twhirl

Mobile

• Tweetie

• SimplyTweet

• twidroid

• UberTwitter

• TwitterFon

• Gravity

Business

• CoTweet

• HootSuite

• TweetLater

• PeopleBrowsr

• Twitter

• EasyTweets

Networking

• Mr. Tweet

• WeFollow

• Who

• Friend

• Twitter

• UnTweeps

Entertainment

• Overheard.it

• Twittervision

• Twistori

• Twitter

• CelebritiesThatTwitter

• Post Like A Pirate

Monitoring

• Objective

• TweetBeep

• PeopleBrowsr

• OneRiot

• Collecta

• Radian6

Media Sharing

• TwitPic

• Qik

• Blip.fm

• twt.fm

• Screenr

• yfrog

Link Tools

• Bit.ly

• Tweetmeme

• Eventbox

• twitterfeed

• Backtweets

• TwitThis

Analytics

• TweetStats

• Twitter

• Twitalyzer

• TweetVolume

• Tweetrush

• Follow Cost

Random

• Peekr

• Post Like A Pirate

• Flip

• Portwiture

• pici.me

• Oh My Science

Read more!

How Twitter messages work when you use @

First, imagine a fictional family where everyone follows each other on Twitter: @Mom, @Dad, @Brother and @Sister.
1. The basics

Rule #1: A person must follow you before you can DM them. If @Mom and @Dad (fictional example names) want to write completely privately so no one will see what they write but each other, they have to DM each other.

Rule #2: Anytime you put an @someone anywhere in a tweet, it will be sent to that @someone, regardless of whether they follow you or not.


Read more …

Read more!

Mass suspension of Twitter accounts underway: what to do if you are affected

Update 8: Official statement from Twitter’s status tumblelog:

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.

We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.

One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.

Update 7: Many accounts are now reporting that Twitter has UNSUSPENDED their account.


Update 6: Official response from Twitter to @TweetLater on their suspended account:  “Spamcloud hit. We’re working on restoring accounts.” (This was reported by Jesse Stay.)

Update 5: Some (few) Twitter users have reported their accounts were unsuspended after about 10 minutes.

Update 4: Some have reported that creating a support ticket with Twitter on this issue results in the ticket being deleted right away. Probably best to wait.

Update 3: Some feel Twitter may have created an unintended consequence in fighting off this attack.

Update 2: Here are some links to places that may also post updates on the situation as they learn more:

1. @Twitter_Tips 
2. Jesse Stay
   
3. Mashable 

Update 1: Check the date on any tweets from official Twitter accounts such as @Spam. Some people are retweeting old messages about old issues that are NOT relevant any more.

Original post:

You have two choices. First, you can wait to see if you are unsuspended soon (many think this is a Twitter error of some kind). This is what I recommend. Many commentators are pointing out accounts that seem EXTREMELY unlikely to merit suspension have been suspended.

Three places you can check for updates from Twitter on this issue are the known issues page, the Twitter Status page, and the Twitter blog.

Or you can put in a support request. Here's how to do that:

1. To put in a support request, click here and make the appropriate choices. Note that this link has been removed from it's old location on the Twitter support site so don't tell people to go to the help site and click the support request link—it's not there anymore (this may change).
2. Experiment with searches like this to see what the latest news it.
   
3. Don't create lots of "What happened?" or "Help me/my friend" tweets. It just clogs up the channel we are all checking for news of what is happening, and doesn't affect Twitter's response at all.

Note: Some people are creating tickets at GetSatisfaction.com You might also want to wait on that, as a huge influx of tickets will be unlikely to get a response. 

Read more!

What's the best way to give retweet attribution on Twitter?

A good Twitter blogger that we've sent (deserved) traffic to had me baffled for a bit this morning. We put out a tweet that sent them 550+ clicks but they felt the tweet was improper. I'm interested to know what people think, and how I could avoid this in the future.

You know how just by the fact of tweeting back and forth things can rapidly get confusing? That's how this conversation started to go (reproduced later in this blog post with name removed: my responses are in a couple shades of green). But first, here's a cartoon summary of how wrong things can go:

So it looked like were headed down this road and although I was still confused when he said he didn't want to talk about it anymore, I was happy it hadn't turned into something like the above. It started something like this:

"[Your] tweet isn't from @UserName it's my blog"

Well, duh, I thought. It was a retweet attribution.  I started to explain that to him kindly (me: "you probably knew that") but then I admitted I couldn't imagine he didn't already understand retweet attribution and could he enlighten me as to what he was asking about?

Next it seemed like he was saying the problem wasn't that it was his blog post, it was that he tweeted about it ("give credit to the real tweeter") and he should get the retweet attribution. Of course, I had never even seen his tweet. I get most of the link for @Twitter_Tips from feeds.

I couldn't imagine that he wanted me to both tweet his stuff and then search his tweets to see if he tweeted about it to give him retweet credit for talking about his own blog, so I asked for further clarification. Then he said he didn't want to talk about it anymore and asked me not to talk about it either.

Here's how the actual conversation went:

Confusion, for sure. I'll blog about it and you can comment to help clear it up if you feel it makes sense to.

And one more point to cleared here, lets act like gentlemen lets not discuss about it :) good day!

Our tweet sent you over 500 human clicks, but I won't do it again w/o saying @yourUserName

as I told you its not your mistake.. take it easy...btw i always credit you when i tweet/rt your links.. good day

You're very kind—it does appear to be my mistake of some kind. I'm not upset (no need to suggest I "take it easy") just trying to understand

As you can see, more along the lines of the cartoon than what I would have hoped for.

Along the way he also posted a link to his followers about "Reposting others' content without attribution" being stealing.  His public post (which I won't reproduce since that would make it too easy to identify him) helped clarify where he was coming from: He wanted me to not only tweet his blog post, he wanted to see his @username in the tweet about it too.

As unreasonable as that sounded at first, I quickly figured out his concern, I think: Since I was using "via @username" at the end instead of "RT @username" at the beginning, he thought it would not be clear who wrote the blog post. He thought I was saying someone else (who doesn't actually have a dedicated blog) was the real author. Aha!

Putting the attribution at the end instead of the beginning can get people confused:

• They might overlook the attribution entirely;
• They might think the attibution is crediting the creator of what is being linked to rather than just being a retweet attribution.

ProBlogger's TwitTip Twitter blog had an article on using "via" instead of "RT" that I shared with this guy but he was obviously so concerned that someone else was being given credit for his work (even though we sent him 500+ visitors to see for themselves) that it got me thinking.

I do a lot of tweeting with the "via-style" retweet  attribution from our account @DivineLove, because quotes are often retweeted on their merits, unlike links which are too often just pimped back and forth to get blog traffic. For quality articles about Twitter I look to feeds rather than reading people's tweets (mostly).

So why not just start tweets with "RT @…"?

I don't like starting with RT because it obscures the topic of the tweet, and lots of people have chimed in that they don't like this either. People have in fact given a number of reasons for ignoring tweets that start with "RT @…" and so I've tended to favor the "via @…" at the end. Since from @Twitter_Tips I don't seek out tweets to find links, it isn't much of a problem.

What do you think?

Is retweet attribution in the form "via @userName" at the end of the tweet too confusing, and should it be avoided?

---

Postscript: Why don't I read more of people's tweets? 

Because most top people tweet their own stuff and other stuff as a "favor" to their friends. Quality has too little to do with it, as long as it meets a minimum standard. At least, that's what I think I've had trouble finding better-quality links by reading through what other people tweet/retweet and rely on popular link feeds such as ReTweetist instead.

Don't get me wrong, I've tweeted some stuff without reading it carefully that has turned out to be bad, but it's not bad because I tweeted it as a favor to someone who would then offer to do the same for me. Since I have so far hardly ever blogged about Twitter, I don't have many articles anyone could tweet anyway!

Also, I'm happy that so far, despite having over 92,000 followers and sending thousands of DMs back and forth to people, I don't know of anyone that has "gone away mad" after communicating with us on @Twitter_Tips. I'm happy to share links with and talk to people from any part of the political (or emotional!) spectrum. 

We've made mistakes and owned up to them, and where we could, fixed them. I appreciate feedback of all kinds and have made numerous changes to how and what we post on @Twitter_Tips based on comments to us from our followers.

Read more!