One of my personal favorite iTweet features is the "in reply to" links that show what tweet a person was @replying to inline - so you can follow conversations without leaving the page you're on.
Previously if no particular status was specified, Twitter assigned the "in reply to" link to the last tweet of the person who was replied to. As of this week, they are only assigning that link if a particular tweet was specified - otherwise there will be no "in reply to" tweet marked. This will help make conversation threading much more clear, but it also required that Twitter API clients get on board with the new method to ensure that threads are clearly designated.
(In case you're wondering, @replies to you will still show up in your Replies tab if no tweet was specified - but there will not be a particular thread attached.)
Here's how I've decided to handle this change - when you click the @ button to send a reply, a small box above the tweet input will show you the tweet you're replying to. If you don't want to mark your tweet as a reply to that status, simply click the "cancel" button.
One bonus of this is that you don't necessarily need to begin a @reply tweet with "@username" - the tweet will get marked as a reply (and appear in the user's Replies tab) whether you use that convention or not.
The only thing you'll need to be careful of is accidentally marking a tweet as part of a conversation if you changed your mind about the original @reply - so don't forget to click the "Cancel" button if you're not going to reply to that tweet.
One idea that occurred to me would be to also tie the "RT" retweet button to this behavior, so that if you retweeted someone they would see that retweet in their "Replies" tab - kind of a nice way of letting them know you liked their tweet enough to retweet it. Does that sound like a helpful addition?
Let me know in the comments, or tweet or email me with your thoughts!
Adding and using this bookmarklet is simple. Just drag the above link into your Safari bookmarks and sync your iPhone to transfer the bookmarklet to your iPhone.
Then, from any Web page that you would like to post on Twitter, just go to your Bookmarks, locate the "Post via iTweet" bookmarklet and select it. A new web page will be opened to http://itweet.net, the link will be shortened using bit.ly, and placed in the Post field ready for tweeting.
I thought about putting the original page's title into the tweet as well, but then I realized I would usually rather make up my own caption. However if the general consensus is that adding the page title to the tweet would be more useful, I can make that change - leave your opinion in the comments here, or email me, or contact me on Twitter.
Thanks to Matt Teske for providing the motivation to make this bookmarklet - I will definitely find it useful and I hope you will too. :-)
One of my personal favorite iTweet features is the "in reply to" links that show what tweet a person was @replying to inline - so you can follow conversations without leaving the page you're on.
Previously if no particular status was specified, Twitter assigned the "in reply to" link to the last tweet of the person who was replied to. As of this week, they are only assigning that link if a particular tweet was specified - otherwise there will be no "in reply to" tweet marked. This will help make conversation threading much more clear, but it also required that Twitter API clients get on board with the new method to ensure that threads are clearly designated.
(In case you're wondering, @replies to you will still show up in your Replies tab if no tweet was specified - but there will not be a particular thread attached.)
Here's how I've decided to handle this change - when you click the @ button to send a reply, a small box above the tweet input will show you the tweet you're replying to. If you don't want to mark your tweet as a reply to that status, simply click the "cancel" button.
One bonus of this is that you don't necessarily need to begin a @reply tweet with "@username" - the tweet will get marked as a reply (and appear in the user's Replies tab) whether you use that convention or not.
The only thing you'll need to be careful of is accidentally marking a tweet as part of a conversation if you changed your mind about the original @reply - so don't forget to click the "Cancel" button if you're not going to reply to that tweet.
One idea that occurred to me would be to also tie the "RT" retweet button to this behavior, so that if you retweeted someone they would see that retweet in their "Replies" tab - kind of a nice way of letting them know you liked their tweet enough to retweet it. Does that sound like a helpful addition?
Let me know in the comments, or tweet or email me with your thoughts!
Will there become a universally accepted standard?
I saw a lot of discussion going on in the Twitterverse recently about standard conventions for "retweeting" - the increasingly popular habit of repeating someone else's tweet verbatim with a credit to their username (or as close to verbatim as possible inside of the 140-character limit).
I personally don't retweet often, but I see it happening more and more every day. (Whether or not this increases the quality of Twitter conversations is a debate for another post.) Enough users of iTweet.net, the Twitter client for the Web and iPhone that I make, requested a retweet button so I went ahead and added one several weeks ago.
Several weeks ago, savvy iTweet.net user David Simmons had written me to ask if iTweet could use the Unicode "recycle" symbol ♺ as a standard for retweeting. I immediately liked the idea - it's expressive, cool-looking and best of all it's only one character long, conserving space for more tweet.
Unfortunately I looked into it and found that the symbol doesn't render in SMS messages or on the iPhone. Since iTweet.net is an iPhone web app, and since a large number of Twitter users rely on SMS, IMO this makes it a no-go for a standard retweet convention. Bummer! Many other Unicode characters display just fine on the iPhone - I don't know why some do and some don't, but ♺ is not one of the friendly ones.
My point here is that if a convention isn't able to be communicated through all channels, it shouldn't become a standard. For this reason I have made the ♺ symbol available in the "symbols" section, but can't recommend using it as a retweet symbol for anyone who wants maximum exposure and clarity in their tweets.
Anyway there is some great discussion on the topic over at Stowe Boyd's blog - go check it out if you're interested - and this made me think I should put my two cents in on the subject.
There has been other discussion about whether "RT" or "via" makes for a better standard. I personally think "via" is a bit more friendly to newbies and a lot more readable, but "RT" seems to be the most common convention, so that's currently what I use in my Twitter client.
The response to iTweet 2's web interface has been truly extraordinary and now WAY surpasses usage of the original iPhone interface. It is so wonderful to see a larger user community developing and producing great stuff like this video. Thanks everyone! Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.
