Retweets and Microsyntax

First, for reference, here is some background information on ‘Microsyntax’:

A week or so ago, Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) posted a message on his blog entitled “Microsyntax: A Messifesto“, in which he outlines his plans for a structured survey of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter, which he defines as “various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages.”  Some obvious examples of these are ‘@’ for replying to people, or ‘#’ for inserting keywords, which, while invented by Twitter users (see Chris Messina’s (@chrismessina) original/updated post on using hashtags from back in August, ’07), have become so commonplace that they are now an indispensable part of the Twitter grammar.  A newer example includes Stowe Boyd’s own suggested “geoslash“, or the use of  “/” to indicate location information in posts.

Stowe has formalized this endeavor by forming the non-profit group Microsyntax.org, and Chris has actually joined him as a member of his advisory board (which he mentions in his blog post outlining the project).  Together, they have started a wiki to aggregate proposals, suggestions, theory, and examples from the wild, and I think that this is a great forum for observing and driving new conventions to help make Twitter even more useful.

Now, some of my own thoughts:

Back in December of 2008, I had a discussion with Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) where I started thinking about possible ways to revise the way that we retweet.  The rest of this post is the result of some more recent thinking on the subject inspired by Chris and Stowe’s efforts:

Basically, the problem with the current ‘RT’ syntax is this: the only information currently carried by “RT @username” is that the person “username” was somehow involved in helping some information making its way to you.  First, because things may be RT’d multiple times, you end up having to either string together multiple “RT”s (and likely run out of space) or start dropping some.  If you start dropping names (not in the social climber sense), do you drop the name of the person who sent it to you and deny credit to a close social connection or instead do you drop the name of the writer and deny credit to the original producer?  Neither option right now is very palatable.  The second major issue is that since the RT doesn’t carry any information about the message itself, you are forced to quote the entire message, which just seems impractical in a 140-character medium.  Removing parts of the quote, then, to save space is actually somewhat misleading, since the quoted information is supposed to represent an original thought from another person.

In summary, RT currently = “no information about the message and limited information about the messenger.”  This is unsatisfying.

To me, given the fact that tweets are logged somewhere for eternity, there should be no reason why we can’t simply find a compact way to link to these original tweets.  Below is my original proposal for doing this, which simply entails appending “R#” to the unique update number of the original tweet:

Thanks to Chris for pointing out that I could use Twistory to retrieve this!

I am not a developer, so the specifics were best left to someone other than me, but I imagined that the trick behind making it easy for people to write these would be providing simple ways for Twitter clients to grab these status numbers and insert them into the tweet automatically, perhaps in a similar fashion to how the Twitter Web client now auto-trims links or how the client Tweetdeck auto-Twitpic’s uploaded photos.  Mike actually wrote (extremely quickly and skillfully, I might add) a Greasemonkey script that plugged a similar functionality in the Twitter homepage, adding a “Retweet This” button which inserted a tag of the form “#twitter:status=tweet_id” into the status update box (the syntax refined by a suggestion from Chris). While this syntax may be clunky and perhaps not as human-readable as Stowe or Chris might be imagining for Microsyntax elements, it’s not really that much more clunky than staring at a twitpic URL, for instance, which Twitter clients now handle expertly.  Ideally, if this syntax took off, it could be integrated directly into clients such as Tweetie or Tweedeck, perhaps in a way that is similar to the way that Tweetdeck handles Twitpics, such that humans never have to worry about interpreting it.

No time to make a mock-up of status screens embedded directly in Tweetdeck, so this twitpic of this sad baby will have to suffice.

In terms of solving the problem mentioned above (that of giving credit to all nodes along the path of a RT), this would provide a unique chain of updates which could somehow be logged in the future:

Original Writer: “Check out this amazing lolcat – http://…”

Retweeter 1: “R#1201420384 Hah, that’s amazing.” (now a program can trace back to the writer)

Retweeter 2: “R#1204235345 Wow, this is going to spread like wildfire!” (the R# links to the re-tweeted message, and through that, we can trace all the way back to the writer)

However, the actual implementation happens, such a reformation of RT would be a boon for a few reasons.  First of all, it would ensure that everyone in a conversation was credited, from the original writer to the most recent node who provided you the information.  I use the word ‘conversation’ now instead of ‘retweet’, since this syntax could extend beyond retweets to any sort of interaction on Twitter.  Twitter is a conversational medium, and this could be used for any sort of interaction where one wants to refer to a specific tweet.  If I post a question to my followers, for instance, they could use this syntax to reply, thus helping people (or a Twitter client) easily trace back to the original question.

Second, as a researcher, this would be incredible.  Using these traces, we could trace an entire network of interaction and information spread on Twitter in a way that is currently not possible.  Researchers who currently look at retweets (such as Dan Zarella) can currently only do very shallow analyses such as searches on “RT” since there is no infrastructure to support this behavior.  A structured syntax for RT’s could provide a rich glimpse into the dynamics of information spread on Twitter.

Anyways, this is really just a first attempt at outlining the problem, and I hope that this post can generate some discussion which may lead to a solution.  Comments, suggestions, and refinements are obviously all welcomed and appreciated.

P.S. If any of you are kind enough to retweet this post, please take the opportunity to think about how limiting the current syntax is while doing so!