by Stowe Boyd

I have been poking around at the question of making comments when reposting earlier tweets made by others. These are generally retweets, preceded generally by 'RT', a convention that is widely supported by clients and Twitter's UI as well. I am writing this discussion in a generalized way, though, since there are a number of proposals and early approaches to what might be called 'REs', where a repost does not include a repetition of the post to be commented on, but just a URL referencing it.

An example RT with a comment:

@skairam: RT @stoweboyd: What convention should I adopt for commenting on retweets? I have seen '>' '::' and many others. » This is what I use.

Here we see the use of '»' as a delimiter, and the RT author's comment trails that until the end of line.

Many have adpted the 'comment at the end model, and I have seen dozens of delimiters in use, like '//', '::', '>', '<' and so on.

A bunch of folks have said they precede the RT with their comment, which seems counterintuitive to me, since I have to heard the thing being retweeted before I can undertand the comment, and the order is backwards. Also, folks are used to the RT being at the start of the tweet.

I was wondering is this is actually part of a more general case, and then I saw this tweet today:

@c3o: RT @seedcamp: @Platogo win techcrunch pitch competition! #tcb09 #scb09 // awesome! congrats, guys.

Imagine that I retweeted this without adding a comment of my own. You'd then see:

@stoweboyd: RT @c30 RT @seedcamp: @Platogo win techcrunch pitch competition! #tcb09 #scb09 // awesome! congrats, guys.

However, someone reading it wouldn't know who had added '// awesome! congrats, guys.'

In the perfect world, RT might have had a beginning and a ending, like quotation marks or the proposal for geoslash. In this way things could have nested. However, we are pretty far down the path on RT to make any changes, and even if we do come up with a convention for introducing a comment at the end of the line, I don't know if we can straighten out all the odd ball cases.

However, it did occur to me that the CoTweet CoTag might play here, aothough it is intended for other purposes today. But in both cases, it could be used to clarify identity associated with the words in a tweet. For example, @c3o could have posted:

@c3o: RT @seedcamp: @Platogo win techcrunch pitch competition! #tcb09 #scb09 ^awesome! congrats, guys.

And then if I were to RT, I could add his username to make it clear @c3o was patting them, not me, and even add my own:

@stoweboyd: RT @c3o RT @seedcamp: @Platogo win techcrunch pitch competition! #tcb09 #scb09 ^c3o awesome! congrats, guys ^Kudos!

In this case it is more or less obvious that the first comment was by @c3o but the 'Kudos!' came from me, the author of the last post in the RT thread.

Update 18 June 2009: Saw this today:

tomrafferty: RT @BreakingNews: Continental Airlines flight 61 from Brussels to Newark has declared emergency after its captain died<<Do passengers know?

Seems Tom is using "<<".