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Friday, August 13, 2010

Twitter: To Retweet, or not to Retweet, that is the question.

Loic Le Meur tweeted out a link to this very cool iPad Wall Mount, The Wallee.

How to fix your iPad on a wall via @billaut http://ping.fm/esbvsFri Aug 13 10:15:46 via Ping.fm



RETWEET BUTTON
If I retweeted it using twitter retweet button, it would have looked like this:



Bad and Good
That works, but there are a few problems with it.

1. I wasn't happy with the wording of the original tweet.

2. I wanted to add a comment.

3. Retweets via twitter's inbuilt retweet mechanism still don't show up in the twitter timeline in some clients like tweetie for the Mac.

The good thing about using the retweet button is that the original tweet is preserved and not altered in any way. Retweets using this method are also tracked.

MANUAL RETWEET
If I manually retweeted it, this would allow me to add a comment in front of the tweet, while retaining the exact content of the original tweet. This involves copying and pasting the tweet, without leaving anything out or changing anything, into a new tweet, and adding an optional comment in front of the tweet, RT, and the original tweeters @name.

Note: Some people leave comments after a manual retweet, but need to give some indication that their comments are not part of the original tweet. There isn't really a standard way of doing this. It becomes confusing. | Good point!

Here's what that looks like:

Translation: How to mount your iPad on a wall. RT @loic How to fix your iPad on a wall via @billaut http://ping.fm/esbvsFri Aug 13 10:57:23 via web



VIA
I didn't want to do that though and decided to use via. This allows me to edit the contents of the original tweet.

Here's what it looks like:

How to mount your iPad on a wall http://ping.fm/esbvs via @loic @billaut Nice instructional videos too!Fri Aug 13 10:30:54 via Tweetie for Mac



This way I can rewrite the tweet in any way I want, and add a comment, but still give credit to both the person who originally wrote it and the person that I saw tweet it.

How do you retweet?