Quick Hits are small updates with three points: First, comments on what’s changed since the last quick hit. Second, what’s coming. Third, what’s standing in the way of what’s coming and also what’s been going on in life that I find share-worthy.
I’d like to announce the grand opening of my new worship blog named “OSHIAMINA” for Satou Amina of AKB48’s Team B. You can find it over at johpan.com/oshiamina. In other news, I just finished writing a piece about Twitter. It’ll be up shortly.
I still have a few more piece ideas in draft. Those’ll come up when they come up. I might have another remix in the works but it’s kinda not working out as planned. I might need to find a new way to go about it. For the same song I’m remixing, I’d like to make a stepchart for it but I’ll put it on the back burner for now. I’m not sure when I’ll continue the stepcharting tutorial videos. I’ll be sure to announce when the next set is coming out.
I’ve really been in an AKB48 mood. I’ve been getting my hands on anything I can since I’ve found out about their variety shows and how awesome they are. Fridays are win because of new Majisuka Gakuen episodes. Also, learning about new people is always fun. That’s why I started the worship blog. But anyway, I hope I have more for you guys for the next update!
Twitter Etiquette: Retweet vs. Reply
The failwhale is displeased.
The goal of twitter is for its users to answer the simple question of “What happening?”. Some answer simply with direct responses: “going to pick up groceries” or “eating lunch”. Others use it as a way to advertise themselves or things they find interesting: a website like Destructoid.com (@dtoid) would tweet every time a new post is up.
A feature of twitter is the ability to discuss. A tweet can be directed to a specific user by using the at symbol (@) and typing their username, no spaces. When logged into the service, if you visit http://twitter.com/#replies, you can see all of the tweets that mention you, even if you don’t follow the person mentioning you.
As with all things overrun by the general public, some choose to defy what the creators had planned for the service and turn it into their own thing. Some of these deviant actions actually increased productivity and functionality. The Hashtag (#) and, more importantly, the Retweet (RT) are two of the results of these actions.
Retweets (only officially supported in late 2009) are when people tweet tweets that are not originally written by them. This is usually done when another person shares news that other people feel their followers should read. For example, if someone you follow tweets about a funny YouTube video to you and you think it’s worth sharing to your followers, retweet it! The first and unofficial (but still used) retweet method was to prepend tweets with [RT @username-of-original-tweeter:] and the original message. Freehanding retweets like that allowed for edits to be made to the original tweet and personal messages to be attached.
This is where my beef starts.
I’m not the biggest fan of when people use the Retweet function when a simple mention would work just as well and even work more to the tweeter’s advantage. The situation specific to my beef is when a conversation between two people becomes a conversation between 2 people and all of the followers of the person retweeting. There a number of things wrong with the above situation.
Officially, a retweet is a relay of a person’s tweet verbatim.
Retweets show up as public tweets. Mentions to users with locked twitter accounts don’t show up in your friend’s dashboards. One can argue that someone that doesn’t want the world to know things shouldn’t be on twitter but that’s why there are locked accounts. The list of followers is there for a reason and if someone isn’t on another person’s followers list, there’s probably a reason for that too.
If you reply to a tweet, twitter keeps track of the tweet that you replied to. If you’ve properly replied to a tweet, it should say “in reply to [username]” in the tweet meta which is a link to the original tweet by the original tweeter. Using a client like TweetDeck, clicking the “in reply to…” opens a side window which lists the chain of corresponding tweets between the tweeters involved.
However, I’m not totally against it. A good example of using Retweets as replies would be if you’re somebody important and someone asks you a question you think that your followers would be curious to know the answer to, be my guest. This is especially useful for when people play trivia/word games or when running contests and the people running it don’t want to reply to repeated questions.
Some tweeters use the retweet like the reply-all button in e-mails mass emails. Some conversations were meant to be private and people don’t want to hear about it but others just don’t care. You can ask me why I’m still following people like that. I’ll say it’s complicated.