Twitter And The Courtesy Of Retweeting
Twitter’s strong word-of-mouth characteristics are derived from the common courtesy of retweets of its user base, not on technology – this is changing with an announcement this week. This arbitrary courtesy is the flaw that could lead to its demise once Twitter becomes more commonplace and the tight knit group of early adopters finds that courtesy gets undermined. For example: I have 100 followers and I post an event notification for the small city I live in. One of my followers (call him @WhatcomTravel) decides that this posting is relevant to his/her followers and decides to retweet my posting. By common courteous he starts the post RT: @myusername which gives me credit for the original posting. If he has 2000 followers, some of them will start to follow me to if they feel my postings are relevant to their interest. In essence they go to the source. Here lies the issue; if they follow me it dilutes the attention that they pay to the person that retweeted my post (@WhatcomTrav