retweet_of_status_id Parameter?

[Abraham Williams]

I wanted to throw the idea out of Twitter adding a retweet_of_status_id parameter to statuses. It would be added the same was as in_reply_to_status_id:

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json?status=text+here&retweet_of_status_id=1342534

A use case is following a retweet thread back to the original souce.

What other use cases are there?

Abraham

--
Abraham Williams | Hacker | http://abrah.am
@poseurtech | http://the.hackerconundrum.com
Web608 | Community Evangelist | http://web608.org
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[Chad Etzel]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Abraham Williams <4br...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What other use cases are there?

Filtering! This would be a client-side setting/option I would expect,
but if there is a retweet_of_status_id field set (or greater than
0/null) then it would indicate a retweet. This would help eliminate
the need for clients to do several regex type matches to determine if
it is, in fact, a retweet (I was actually implementing such regex
matching in some of my code as we speak).

However, since I think Twitter.com itself does not recognize retweets
in any form or fasion as being different than any other normal tweet
(as opposed to replies (now mentions) which it treats as special
tweets), they may not want to "acknowledge" them officially in the API
until they do so on the site.

Now that retweets are a logical subset of mentions, it may be a different story.

-Chad

[Abraham Williams]

Oh I forgot to mention that the web interface could be changed from:

about 5 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to poseurtech

to:

about 5 hours ago from twitterrific retweeting poseurtech

or some other better sounding wording.
 

[Doug Williams]

Abraham,
Valid suggestions all around but until the site itself formalizes the
idea of retweets, the API cannot offer it. Both work with the same
data.

Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw