Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie 2 for Mac was announced back before Twitter threw the switch on the retweet API, and we haven’t heard a word about it since. Supposedly it’s in development, but despite patient waiting, there hasn’t been a beta or even any news about it.

I don’t want to sound impatient, or be an overly-demanding customer, but I think we should at least get a status report. The last one was in September.

Federico Viticci of MacStories posted an excellent Open Letter to Loren Brichter, Developer of Tweetie, so obviously I’m not alone in this thinking.

I understand that making a good app requires time. A lot of time. Guess how much time an high-quality app such as Tweetie would require. But the situation is getting a little bit awkward. I’m talking about Tweetie for Mac and the long-awaited 2.0 version which, in your words, was due to be released after Tweetie 2 for iPhone. You said Tweetie for Mac was upcoming back in September.

Tweetie is an excellent piece of software, but it’s missing some features that are critical to many of its most loyal users. I understand that development is difficult and time-consuming work, but would it be too hard to give us an update or two as to how things are going?

What do you think of it? Is it a good idea, or does it need more work?

My opinion is that it will make it a lot easier to retweet things, which may in turn increase the number of times things are retweeted. No more trying to edit the tweet to fit “RT @username” in. All you have to do is push a button and move on. I think it will also clean up our timelines, since you’ll only see a particular retweet once, shown as the original author’s tweet, instead of seeing twelve reposts of the same thing. I think the biggest thing missing is the inability to add commentary, which matters in some situations, but isn’t necessarily something you have to do every day.

What’s your take? Take a minute to answer the poll below and/or leave a comment.

Note: If you’re viewing this in an RSS aggregator you might have to click through to see the poll.

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<excerpt>Learning CSS Sprites http://bit.ly/3HlYUl</excerpt>
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If you want to see a quick example of how you can use the API, have a look at this WP Recipes snippet: Display the number of tweets for each page or post.

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @redwall_hp <?php the_permalink(); ?>"
title="Retweet this page">Tweet it!</a>

When clicked, it takes the visitor to Twitter, where it fills-in the update box for you.

Just be sure to change “@redwall_hp” to your username.

Now you can, at least, if you use Tweetie for Mac.

I whipped-up a quick Greasemonkey script, known as Tweetie Retweet URL Replacer, that rewrites any Tweetmeme button you come across to load the retweet into Tweetie.

This works on the same principle as the bookmarklet that Atebits supplies on the Tweetie website.

At the present, the userscript only works with Tweetmeme buttons, but I may expand it to include other popular widgets in the future.

The general idea is that Twitter.com, and the myriad of third-party applications, will have retweet links that, when clicked, allow you to immediately repost the update. The tweet will be shown in your followers’ timelines as if it were from the original poster, but with a “Retweeted by username” notice underneath. (Personally, I think there needs to be a way to edit the tweet before reposting it, so you can add your own commentary.)

Until major Twitter clients add support for the new retweets, which hopefully will be pretty much immediately after the changes go live, retweets will disappear from your home timeline entirely.

We don’t want to break existing apps that don’t add retweeting support or create a confusing experience for that app’s users. So the /statuses/friends_timeline API resource will remain unchanged–i.e. retweets will *not* appear in it.

For those who *do* want to support retweets, we are adding a new (more aptly named) /statuses/home_timeline resource. This *will* include retweets. The /statuses/friends_timeline API resource will continue to be supported in version 1 of the API. In version 2 it will go away and be fully replaced by /statuses/home_timeline.

These changes will open up some interesting options. Twitter clients will be able to do things like highlight retweets in a different color, put them in a separate column (in clients like TweetDeck), or show you tweets of yours that have been retweeted recently.

It was important for us that retweets are easily differentiated visually from regular tweets. If someone you follow retweets a tweet, the original tweet will appear in your timeline whether you follow the author of the original tweet or not, just as it currently does when users use the “RT” convention. Seeing a tweet in your timeline from someone you don’t follow without being told it was shared from someone you *do* follow could be confusing. So we’re encouraging developers to be mindful of this confusion and make retweets stand out visually from regular tweets.

It will certainly take awhile to get used to the changes, and developers will have their share of work to do. (I wonder how TweetMeme will change their popular retweet button to accommodate the changes…) But one good thing will come of it at least, besides making it easier for newbies to grasp the idea of retweeting: You’ll only see a retweet once, no matter how many people you follow tweet it. This will end the sea of duplicate retweets that occur when a tweet goes crazy-viral.