For those who don’t have an account with Twitter, it’s a microblogging service that limits posts (or “tweets”) to 140 characters or less. At first, it was adopted by the social geeks, online personalities, and web pages for another medium of content delivery. Then celebrities got it. Then everyone who loves celebrities got it to stalk them. So now, everyone and their plants has a twitter account.

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.

1. That’s not the Retweet’s function.

Officially, a retweet is a relay of a person’s tweet verbatim.

2. It undermines the original tweeter’s privacy.

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.

3. Twitter functionality actually makes it easier to follow conversations through replies

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.