Retweet is stupid
Sunday, April 26, 2009 by Dave Winer.
Okay I'm going to get crucified for this, but I found myself saying this on the phone today to Andrew Baron. If I was willing to say it to him, I should have the guts to say it publicly. 
Now, I'm not saying the people who retweet are stupid, or the impulse to pass on a link to everyone who follows you is stupid, but...
A retweet is the same as voting up something on Digg or Reddit. It's a piece of metadata about the tweet, and should be stored and displayed with the tweet. When you retweet something, none of the 140 characters should be used in saying that it's a retweet and who it came from.
Digg does it right, Twitter --> wrong.
Another app that does it right is FriendFeed.
Look at this post, it's been liked a lot. When I wrote this it had 225 likes! Like is FriendFeed's term for retweet.
Nothing needs to be done, but I'm glad to get this out there, once and for all.
Hope you're having a happy Sunday! 
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"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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