Retweets - where are they placed on timeline

[Tim Haines]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if anyone can clarify.  

The services I run often shown tweets that are several months old, and offer the RT button next to them.  If someone clicks to RT the tweet, how does the tweet get presented to people that aren't following the original tweeter?  Is it placed at the top of the timeline appearing as a new tweet, or is it placed at the time the original tweet was tweeted?  i.e. months ago, so likely to never be seen?

If it would be placed months ago, it makes RT pointless for older tweets, in which case I'll switch to 'classic mode' RT's.  

Tim.

[Marcel Molina]

Should appear as a new tweet with the time of the retweet, not the
original tweet creation time. That assumes though that no one else has
retweeted it to you yet. If someone else has then this additional
retweet won't appear in your timelines except for the
statuses/retweets/id resource that lists up to 100 retweets for a
given tweet. Duplicates are collapsed out of the other timelines.

--
Marcel Molina
Twitter Platform Team
http://twitter.com/noradio

[Dewald Pretorius]

Marcel,

This collapsing behavior is far from ideal and will cause people with
busy timelines to completely miss retweets.

Nobody is online 24x7, and if only the first retweet of an update is
shown in a user's timeline, they will miss completely it if the first
retweet happened several hours before they login and check their
timeline.

In other words, someone can retweet the same update while they are
online and they still won't see it.

From a Twitter-internal technical standpoint, new retweets are ideal
because it eliminates a lot of duplication and accompanying processing
and storage requirements.

From a user's perspective, it is far from ideal.

With old-style retweets, if I saw ten retweets of the same thing, I
knew to check it out because obviously a lot of people felt it was
something worth sharing with their followers. With the new retweets,
I'm going to miss that completely. Even if I notice the first retweet,
the "retweeted by" section may show only one or two people, and I
won't know that the update was retweeted by twenty more people after I
happened to look at it.

In my irrelevant opinion, the new retweet feature is trying to fix
something that was not broken.

Dewald

On Nov 17, 3:58 pm, Marcel Molina <mar...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Should appear as a new tweet with the time of the retweet, not the
> original tweet creation time. That assumes though that no one else has
> retweeted it to you yet. If someone else has then this additional
> retweet won't appear in your timelines except for the
> statuses/retweets/id resource that lists up to 100 retweets for a
> given tweet. Duplicates are collapsed out of the other timelines.
>

[Tim Haines]

Hey Dewald,

What if your twitter client had a feature of showing you tweets in your timeline that had been retweeted by 10 or more people?  That's possible now.  It was very very difficult before.

Marcel, thanks for your reply earlier.  I noticed something yesterday that indicated this 'probably' wasn't happening.  (RT by NZKoz, which he's since deleted).  I'll do more testing today, and likely find what was wrong with my testing yesterday.  :-)

Tim.

[Marcel Molina]

As Tim mentioned, clients are empowered to uncollapse retweets if they'd like.

[Rich]

Does everyone have access to the ReTweet beta now? If not when is
expected deployment. I have a fully working ReTweet API
implementation but I don't want to submit it to Apple until everyone
has access to it.

[Marcel Molina]

The retweet feature is currently rolled out to 50% of users. We
gradually ramping it up. Full availability should be soon unless
issues arise as we incrementally roll it out. Thanks for your
patience. It's awesome to have people ready to pull the trigger on
retweet.

[Dave Sherohman]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:37:32PM -0800, Dewald Pretorius wrote:
> This collapsing behavior is far from ideal and will cause people with
> busy timelines to completely miss retweets.

I disagree completely. If you have 57 retweets of the same status in
your timeline, then all this duplicated, redundant noise forces fresh,
new content off the end prematurely. It gets bad enough at times that
I'm forced to tell TweetDeck to filter out everything containing the
text "RT @".

One of the first features that got me thinking about building a custom
Twitter client was that I wanted to be able to identify and filter out
duplicate updates so that I would see each status update *once*, no
matter how many people were repeating it. Thankfully, Twitter is now
(or will shortly be) providing that function automatically. (Although,
if I were to have done it, I would go a step further and suppress *all*
retweets if the original had appeared in my timeline.)

> With old-style retweets, if I saw ten retweets of the same thing, I
> knew to check it out because obviously a lot of people felt it was
> something worth sharing with their followers.

And if I saw them, I would think "Oh, good god... I wasn't interested
in it the first nine times, I'm not going to be interested this time
either. How long do I have to wait before people just shut up about
that already?"

> In my irrelevant opinion, the new retweet feature is trying to fix
> something that was not broken.

As another response mentioned, clients have the ability to un-collapse
retweets, so those of us who view constant retweets of the same thing as
worthless noise can get our timelines uncluttered and those of you who
use them as a means to judge social approval and/or importance have the
tools to do that as well. Give it a couple weeks, and I bet someone
will be working on a way to do that which works even better than the
old-style retweets, perhaps based on preiodically polling the retweets
timeline and presenting its contents sorted by most retweets in the last
hour/day. This change sets the stage for serving both of us better.

--
Dave Sherohman

[artesea]

Do we have an example in json of a message which was retweeted 3 or 4
times.
The example on http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-home_timeline
is a single retweet in XML.
Just trying to work out if the retweet moves up the timeline with each
retweet, or if it stays with the very first tweet.
Also looking at how I can expand the timeline to show all the RTs.

Thanks
Ryan