I think it is “hunky dory” instead of “honky dory” — let’s not get into racist nomenclature;-)

Looking forward to reading your article.

Quick feedback:

I tweet because I am.
I retweet because I am networked –
and want to get good ideas/findings circulated.

Best, Barry Wellman

You touch on this when you bring up the shortened URL which, as you point out, proves the user’s access to your article was via the person who shortened that URL.

There are certainly lots of cases in Twitter where people learn something from one person and decide to pick up the thread without using the text “RT” or any of the other attributions.

So, an interesting point to me here is why the RT text is used. It affects all the cases you cover. If someone were really just retweeting to show their own audience something new that they thought was cool, why not just point friends to the link? There’s more going on here – people are driven to credit the person who pointed them this direction, and they are driven to do that for a reason. Since characters are at a premium, this drive must be quite strong.

The reason may be because people don’t want to “plagiarize” – but that wouldn’t apply in cases where users are paraphrasing or altering the original tweet. The reason may be because people really want to give credit where credit is due, a sort of altruism. But in many of the cases you quoted, such as a user retweeting another user’s point to your blog post, the credit isn’t going to a person who actually did the original thinking (i.e. you), it’s just going to someone who read your post (maybe takes some brains to read but come on!)

Given this, I think that a hypothesis about what is driving people not to retweet (everyone passes on interesting tidbits in conversation) but to credit the person they are retweeting and admit they are not being totally original, should be a key point in this paper. You could search for shortened URLs in much-retweeted tweets and see how many times those shortened URLs came up in other tweets without crediting the source of the link. Then you could make your own judgment whether the non-creditors were complete boors who were pretending to have discovered something on their own, or whether something else was at work.

Personally I can see how using RT when passing along an idea may be linked to the idea you explored of attention-seeking, wanting to prove that one is part of an “in” crowd, wanting to amplify one’s own voice and therefore amplifying others’ in anticipation of reciprocation, and so forth. Or maybe it’s just a new sensibility that people who are “finders” of the new conversationally useful tidbits play a valuable role in the ecosystem and should be politely recognized? Or a desire to prove one’s authenticity by not claiming credit for a discovery one didn’t make oneself (but how often is any discovery made completely independently? How did that user learn about your blog in the first place? Probably not by running into you on the street, but whoever pointed him there originally isn’t getting any credit…)

The most positive take I can come up with is that with the rising popularity of open source and the increased connectivity between people who have never met face to face comes a stronger recognition that everything we do online is thanks to someone unrecognized working away, that whatever we can do to build connections will only strengthen us as a community, and that only jerks take credit for other people’s work. On the cynical side, I think there’s a strong recognition among the Twitterati that in the early days of blogging links between the popular blogs solidified the elite bloggers and led to increased search recognition. Twitter is still in early enough days that it’s land grab time — the users who become part of the “in crowd” and who grab the biggest audience share now will be the new cyberelite. Is using RT when passing along an idea, instead of just passing it along, a way to become part of the “in crowd”?

Made me rethink my RT vs. via message strategy and issues of authorship, which really hadn’t come into play for me (especially when forwarding RT @, RT @, RT @ messages!!), as I’m more generally interested in just getting the info/links to my followers. Rethinking now!

Really great overview and thoughts/questions of an emerging tool.

Thanks.

Just a little addition – RT can be confusing to new users of Twitter, who are not sure of the jargon they should use. This is why some of the messages have RT and not a username. Also, some of them are requesting others to retweet.

I remember when I just started on twitter, and I wanted to forward someone else’s tweet, and I just used “retweet @user ABC”, then I saw that others are using RT, which was shorter and made much more sense.

Also, like you said, I use “(via @user)” only at the end of a tweet, and if I changed, translated (which I do sometimes), or actually heard it directly from the person (i.e. via email or chat).

Excellent paper, can’t wait for more entertaining writing.

I must, however, point out that you may consider putting in a kind of crisper/standout definition of What exactly is a Retweet, so that its easier for the the uninitiated to get started.

Thanks

Clearly there are some instances where meaning is distorted when retweets are passed on – the tweet that falsely suggested that @eszter’s boyfriend had broken up with her or that All green had dies.

Out of all retweets, how many become obviously distorted as above, and how many others are misunderstood because of changes (using surveys to test understanding of the changed message).

My guess is that the strong majority of retweets do convey the original meaning. But that would be an interesting question to answer.