retweet

Twitter's broken data model becomes slightly less broken

September 19, 2009

I don't usually have anything nice to say about Twitter (though I still ignore my mother's advice and say it anyway), but the company is finally taking steps to improve one of the most glaring faults with their service: retweets. Previously, retweets were simply new tweets that happened to contain old information. This created clutter [...]

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Twitter, exposed

July 2, 2009

Twitter's data model is, interestingly enough, entirely user generated. Hashtags of every variety, retweets, and other methods of ascribing meta-information to tweets have developed outside any formal structural model or standard. The lone first-party implementation is that a "@" prefix links directly to a person, and even that isn't fully functional. All of my problems [...]

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The flow of information

June 16, 2009

This NYT article on Twitter and Iran sums it all up (emphasis mine): “We’ve been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony,” said Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor. “The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over.” It's an amazing and deserved accolade for the young service. But. [...]