Power Twitter users should know all about retweeting, but it’s a feature I find new users don’t ever use because they don’t even know about it. Retweeting is taking someone’s message and reposting it in your own Twitter stream giving recognition to the original user. It’s kind of like a footnote in a book or giving reference to your sources. The purpose of doing this is you think someone else has a good idea and you should share it with your own community. It’s always a good idea to give credit where credit is due.

You’ll want to make efficient use of retweeting. If you were to retweet everything then nothing you tweet is probably important even if you think everything you tweet is beneficial to your followers. You’ll want to tweet interesting content that will provide some use to your followers. It will also help you build better relationships with people because it will connect you with those you have retweeting. It’s been said that those users that get retweeted the most are those that have the most influence on Twitter. Retweeting is the highest form of flattery on Twitter. Retweeting can bring valuable information to your followers as long as you use it correctly. If you don’t abuse the privilege it can bring quality and value to you as a Twitter users.

So now that you have the background about retweeting you’re probably wondering how it’s done. Here are some examples:

• RT @user original message
• RT: @user: original message
• Retweet @user original message
• via @user original message

The @ sign is common syntax to refer to a person on twitter. The retweet syntax can also be anywhere in the message. I think most people put it at the beginning of the message and the client I use (EventBox) uses the syntax in the first example. I hope this helps you build better Twitter relationships. See you on Twitter.

For those of you in the design/development industry getting started with Twitter, following influential Tweeters will put a wealth of knowledge right at your fingertips. I’ve found that using Twitter and RSS feeds gives me a good solid collection of daily resources that would take me hours to find otherwise. It also takes a lot of my time, but I feel like if I’m reading quality content then it’s productive time and not wasted time.

Colorburned has a great list of people to start following and I’ve been following quite a few of them for some time and they’re a wealth of information. With all the lists like these posted you see a lot of the same people all the time as well as some fresh faces to follow. As always feel free to follow our company and also feel free to follow me personally. Our company will always return the follow. I use my personal account more interactively so don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back there. I can’t keep up with the few followers I have now so I’m a little more selective.

Twitter is a powerful tool. Some say it may be one of the biggest web tools of 2009. I hope you sign up and enjoy the benefits of using the site.

Update: Naldz Graphics posted a list of 300+ active twitter users.

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately and I’ve been able to incorporate it into my daily life as well as integrated into many of my blogs and websites.  I think it’s a great idea and a great service, but in terms of reliability not so great.  I’m hoping that their new investments will really help out the service because I think it brings a great deal of value to my sites as well as sites of others.

Recently since Twitter has been down, it’s slowed a lot of my websites down.  The connection needs to timeout and this can make a website seem extremely slow.  I suppose I could cache results more often, but that defeats the whole idea of Twitter where you want to know what’s going on right now.

I’ve read articles saying that the platform wasn’t really developed with scalability in mind and that they are looking to develop the system using a different architecture.

I think a lot of people don’t take this into consideration.  When I develop websites for clients many people don’t take that into consideration.  Sure if you are a small business with little website traffic or you have a small blog with a few writers it probably doesn’t make a difference.  If you are trying to build the next best social network however you need to consider it now or pay the consequences later.  You could always neglect it now, but look to change that in the future.  You would need to make sure that you do take care of it before you get as big as something like Twitter.

Now it’s a huge task for them since they have a ton of users using it all the time and they are looking to build reliability into a system thats already developed and running.  I hope they have the time and money to fix those issues because it really is a great service.  It would be a shame if I had to remove it from my sites completely.

What are you doing?  This is the question Twitter is trying to answer.  I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Twitter.  I’ve integrated Twitter with the API on this site as well as installing plug-ins for things like Facebook.  For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a social networking site which is primarily based on status messages.  It’s what I like to call “mini-blogging” because it’s short quick posts.  Twitter also makes it relatively easy to update.  You can IM, text message, use the web, or use applications that use the Twitter API to post to your profile.  This is nice because there are times when I don’t blog because it takes time and sometimes I’m just too busy.  With Twitter it takes no time to update.
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