I’ve noticed that a lot of high profile (read lots of followers) Twitter accounts retweet their retweets. In other words, personA writes a tweet, personB retweets it, then personA retweets that retweet. What do you think? Tacky? Smart marketing move? Something else?

You should follow me on twitter.

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The Mac version is in beta testing; there is a trial version for Windows.

Post first appeared at com495 course blog.

Almost two weeks ago, I urged early recipients of the Twitter retweet link to be cautious with its use, because most third party clients seemed unable to display these retweets.

Today I’m repeating the caution, and it’s not only because of spotty third party client implementation. It’s also because these new retweets don’t become “real time” in the Twitter.com timeline for tweets made by anyone you are already following.

High Level Summary
One of the advantages (to the original author) of RTs is that each becomes a new tweet, a new instance. This increases the chance that someone will “see” the original tweet.

Think of a retweet as “bumping” an item “up” in time. But that’s not how the new Twitter.com interface works. On low volume accounts, this isn’t a big issue. But on moderate- to high-volume accounts (measured by number followed), it is. Here’s why.

Twitter doesn’t “bump” the old tweet — it merely changes the “retweeted by” count. So if you read your Tweets on the Twitter.com site and missed a tweet the first time around, you’ll miss it each-and-every time it’s retweeted … because it will remain in “history,” far below the fold.

The third party clients that have implemented the new retweet feature, however, appear to be treating the retweet like a new instance. In other words, they are treating them like the “old” retweets. The problem: some popular third party clients haven’t yet implemented the feature.

1. Twitter.com – The new RT feature does not “bump” tweets, ie, these new retweets are not “real time” for tweets made by anyone you are already following. I think this is a fatal flaw.
2. TweetDeck — both desktop and iPhone application — is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
3. Seesmic Desktop is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
4. Brizzly, a beta web interface for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts, is displaying the new retweets
5. Tweetelator and Tweetie2 (iphone apps) are still displaying the new retweets

Methodology
In order to test how well clients render the new retweets, I “bracketed” the new retweet with an old-fashioned copy-and-paste one — either immediately before or immediately after using the Twitter retweet link. I sent retweets from all three of my accounts: @kegill, @kegill_uw, @kathygill. Each account follows the other two; this is great for testing!

1. Twitter.com
Even though I do not follow Howard Rheingold from my @kegill_uw account, the retweet showed up in that timeline on Twitter.com, with his avatar. Note that the timestamp relates to when Howard tweeted, not when I retweeted. This is a major change and is a little jarring if you’re looking at tweets before and after it that were sent seconds ago. Twitter should add the time stamp after “you”. This time-stamp business has other ramifications that I will explain momentarily.

This Tweet Appeared In My Timeline As "Retweeted"

On both of my low-volume accounts, the Twitter.com interface shows both original and test retweets in real-time. But on my high volume account, @kegill, not a single test tweet (there were four) was displayed in real-time. Why not?

For example, the @kathygill timeline shows multiple retweets — both the “test” retweets as well as tweets retweeted by the account and by other accounts. This is a very very low volume account (follows 18 mostly low-volume accounts).

Example of Multiple Retweets, @kathygill Timeline

Next, see an example of the @kegill timeline, with the @eMarketer test retweet showing at the top. In this instance, the test retweet was made after the new retweet, as you can see from the prior screen capture.

The original tweet, with the eMarketer avatar, did not appear in my @kegill real-time timeline on Twitter.com, although I retweeted it, using the new feature, from both @kathygill and @kegill_uw. I went 5 minutes back in time looking for it, even though the tweets were sent seconds apart.

This is a big problem with the new feature.

Because @kegill already follows @eMarketer, that tweet had already been displayed in my timeline. The new retweet doesn’t “bump” the tweet in time, it merely changes the “how many people RTed” data on the original tweet. This means retweets aren’t “real-time” for anyone who is already following the account you retweet. I think this is a fatal flaw.

Twitter.com Displayed Only The Test Tweet In @kegill Real-Time Timeline

However, if someone that I do not follow is retweeted by someone that I do follow, that retweet shows up in real-time, even when it’s really old (in this case, 48 hours old):

Real Time Retweet From Someone @kegill Does Not Follow

One of the advantages of the new feature, however, is public metrics. Twitter added a “Retweets” link beneath favorites (right hand navigation). It’s a handy way to see how many people retweet the things you do (or your tweets) as well as who they are.

2 and 3. TweetDeck and Seesmic

This is the latest version of TweetDeck

I made several attempts to see if TweetDeck would display a tweet that was retweeted via the new web interface link. Not a single one was displayed on TweetDeck, whether iPhone app or desktop app. I do have the latest version of TweetDeck on both the desktop and iPhone.

Here are sample screenshots — they show the “test” retweet (copy-and-paste). I guess you’ll have to take my word for it when I saw the original did not show on any screen.

In this screenshot from the desktop, the “test” retweet was sent immediately after the original. Howard Rheingold’s tweet, without my “test” label, did not show up in TweetDeck.

TweetDeck Desktop - No New Retweets

The same is true for TweetDeck iPhone. In this instance, the “test” retweet was sent immediately prior to the original.

TweetDeck iPhone - No New Retweets

Seesmic Desktop does not display the new retweets, either. What follows are three screen captures — one from Twitter.com, showing a retweet; one from Seesmic, showing that it is missing; and one from Tweetdeck, showing that it’s missing.

Retweet In Context From @kegill Timeline

Seesmic Does Not Display The New RT

TweetDeck Does Not Show The Retweet Either

4. Brizzly
Brizzly is in beta (just ask if you’d like an invitation) and is doing a great job of rendering new retweets.

Brizzly Displays New Retweets

4. iPhone application Tweetelator
There’s no change since my last report; Tweetelator is still displaying the new retweets. Moreover, it marks them with a little flag:

Tweetelator Marks New Retweets With A Flag

Conclusion
First, the new retweet link is designed to make it easier for people to retweet. However, there’s nothing to stop old-fashioned copy-and-paste if you’re using the Twitter.com web interface. Keep an eye on how your third-party clients implement this feature — will they retain their current “RT” process or adopt the new? My vote is for the former.

Second, one advantage of using the retweet link is the Retweets summary link, just below Favorites in the right-hand navigation. This feature makes public statistics about each retweet — just how many people retweeted and who they are. I’m not convinced this advantage outweighs the limitations of retweets not being real-time, however, for moderate- to high-volume accounts.

Therefore, until Twitter displays retweets in real-time in the timeline (something that I doubt they will do) and until all third party clients display retweets (hopefully like Tweetelator and Brizzly, in real-time), I again urge caution if you are using Twitter for branding or influence. Not only is there an issue with everyone being able to see these retweets (think Tweetdeck) but there is the issue of their possibly not being real-time on the Twitter.com interface.

Update: problem resolved. User error (but you’d probably already guessed that!)

The goal this afternoon … walk five communication students through setting up WordPress on their UW student accounts. Armed with the UW step-by-step instructions and with the help of Kristina Bowman, it seemed doable. After all, Kristina and I had both done this before.

Well, it wasn’t doable.

After two hours, the students left the lab disappointed. They were far more familiar with “pico” and “cd” and “ls” than they ever wanted to be, I’m certain.

I uninstalled, reinstalled; uninstalled, reinstalled. I found one place — ONE — where I’d made a mistake the first walk-through. But even that wasn’t enough to make phpMyAdmin work (although it did result in a different error message) or cause WordPress to complete its installation.

Here We Go
Computing services has a few relevant “how to” pages:

• Installing Word Press
• Using the UW mysql Libraries
• Installing phpMyAdmin

(1) The first prerequisite is mysql. We successfully got mysql running (step 11). However, everyone ran into an error when trying to grant privileges to “root@” … “grant command not found” (step 9). [1]

Error : no "grant" command found

(2) Nevertheless, we moved to on phpMyAdmin installation. Several of us had problems. The tutorial says:

The phpmyadmin configuration script hasn’t been working very well.

You can say that again. We had a 25 percent success rate; everyone else had create a config.inc.php file from scratch and then copy-and-paste from the tutorial, followed by an edit, per the tutorial.

We were then able to set up phpMyAdmin, but were unable to administer the account: “Host ‘courses02.u.washington.edu’ is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server”. Huh? Is this related to the inability to “grant” privileges while setting up mysql? [In the off chance that the courses alias is linked with the student server, I substituted "vergil.u.washington.edu" for "ovid.u.washington.edu" ... and got the same error message.]

Success setting up phpMyAdmin

UW mysql installation rejects connection

(3) Not terribly surprising, WordPress would not install either. I know that the login information is correct (root, mysql-password). And the path to the database server is also correct. So what gives?

WordPress would not install, either.

Dangling Prerequisite
The WordPress installation tutorial has two prereqs. The first, get mysql running, is clear (and there is a link to the tutorial, even if following it was less than successful). The second, related to the php.ini file, not so much:

Before you install a PHP application on your account you should configure your php.ini file. In order to do this you need to copy the file to your public_html directory and then edit any settings you need to change. You should at least edit the upload_tmp_dir setting. Depending on the application and how you’re using it, other settings might also be a good idea.

I talked to a WordPress-savvy admin who helped me find the ini file; I then edited it per the “minimum” (upload_tmp_dir) recommendation.

mysql error
After writing this, I started thinking about permissions. So I tried to shut down mysql. Something is clearly amiss, however, because I cannot (and yes, I know the password):

-psh-2.05b$ ./bin/mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown

Enter password:

./bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed

error: ‘Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)’

I tried to reset the mysql password. After all, if I can’t stop the process, there’s something bad happening with authentication. I followed this UW tutorial. Copy and paste instruction set failed here, too.

Syntax error in UW instruction set

So, one more time, delete the mysql installation.

Catalyst Call Thursday
Thursday I’ll get on the phone to Catalyst and see if they can figure out what went wrong. Fingers crossed.

[1] I was right to identify the problem as being permissions.

The instructions say “type these commands” when issuing mysql commands. But I was still “copying-and-pasting” like I’d been doing with the UNIX commands. However, in mysql, the backspace key kicks you “out” – you go back into shell prompt. So when I’d try to backspace to change “password” to the password in order to grant permissions … I’d get kicked back to shell prompt. However, I wasn’t “seeing” the difference. Hats off to Nick, who spotted it!

Other notes:

• Syntax for using secure Terminal: “ssh YourUWNetID@UWHost”
• Fugu

Update: more details at FlipTheMedia. From the YouTube business blog:

• MyPosterous: The Economist on music piracy: flawed article, but still worth a read
• MyPosterous: The Economist on blah CEOs
• GoogleReader: themes from COM546, evolution of digital communication technologies – Slideshare – Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)
• GoogleReader: if you’re not tired of the vilification of Google by media moguls – (1) TechCrunch – How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google and Shift the Balance of Power In Search (2) Inconsistent policy at WSJ does not “make sense” (3) My piece from last week: Murdoch on Google, Copyright and Pay-To-View
• Media Transformation: Up for grabs, the nature of “authority” (Clay Shirky, Yale confab)
• Politics + Media: Should reporters have to “ok” taping (and subsequent transcript release) of an interview with a public official? IOW, should such recordings be exempt from “thou must get permission to record” laws? I think these interviews should be recorded as a matter of course – by both sides. Case involves former CA Gov Jerry Brown. See The Slow Death of Off-the-Record
• Ethics In Media: Washington and Lee should not have invited Jason Blair to talk ethics. (via Romensko) Amen.
• Read the small print: John Grubot at Daring Fireball reads Joe Wilcow the riot act on Nokia v iPhone profitability claims
• Politics + Economics: How to prevent the next financial crisis
• Politics + Twitter: I said last year that Obama’s tweets weren’t his: “I’m too clumsy for Twitter” (Mashable)

We’ll see if I can turn this into a quasi-daily habit. Some of these were seeded individually via Tweets.

Summer 2010, I’m going to teach a class on designing smartphone applications. This is in the University of Washington MCDM program, so the focus is audience, goals, UI, technical spec (not actual code). And the goal isn’t necessarily to build the best application, in the historical sense of the word (think PhotoGene, for example). Rather, what sort of iPhone applications should businesses and organizations be developing to connect with their customers.

We’re calling it the “iPhone” class (shorthand), and since that’s the smartphone that I own, it’s where I can experiment with applications. I prefer to experiment with free! So I’m looking for nominations… and starting to collect resources. The first is this review of Chipotle at MakeUseOf.com.

Update 11 November:
Pearl Jam has pulled the clip from YouTube. :-/

I’m Never Gonna Give You Up, from Pearl Jam’s official YouTube channel. What is Rickrolling? See widipedia, Wired.com.

In an interview with SkyNews Australia, Rupert Murdoch continued to insist that Google (and other search engines) are “stealing” his content and that newspapers should never have “given away” their content for free. And he hinted that News Corp. would soon block search engines from indexing their web sites and would successfully challenge the “fair use” of links in court. (YouTube interview clip embedded below.)

Like many other executives in the newspaper business, Murdoch trots out the claim that readers have always “paid” for their news by purchasing a newspaper. This is false; readers pay for the convenience of having the content delivered — advertisers have footed the bill for content creation. Subscription fees don’t cover the cost of printing and distribution! How long are these men going to be allowed to make such false claims? When will reporters act like something other than stenographers?

Murdoch asserts that search engines like Google, Microsoft and Ask.com “steal our stories – they just take them.” This claim suggests a wholesale copy-and-paste, not a headline, link and sentence or two. Murdoch agrees that search engines drive traffic, “but what’s the point of someone who comes occasionally,” he continues. “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website, but paying.”

Murdoch is extremely dismissive of search traffic, so why is it that only about a third of the stories on the WSJ home page today were blocked by a paywall? Could it be that “you can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere” or maybe “don’t charge for the most popular content on your site”? Those observations, by the way, came from Alan Murray, executive editor of the WSJ, at a Neiman Labs talk in April.

The only content that you can charge for is content that can’t be found elsewhere, content on which you hold a monopoly, in other words. That’s why I think Murdoch is bluffing, although I’ve no idea why he’s bluffing.

The SkyNews reporter asked why NewsCorp hasn’t blocked search engines with something as simple as a robots.txt file. Danny Sullivan made this point last month, when Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson made similar claims at an east coast conference.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” Murdoch responded.

He then went on to describe the quasi-wall in place at the Wall Street Journal, but according to Staci Kramer at PaidContent, he doesn’t understand how the WSJ and Google work. (Kramer’s description matches my experience with WSJ links off of GoogleNews. Of the top 36 stories/videos on today’s home page, only 12 were pay-to-view. Of the three of these that I found on Google News, I could read the entire story via the RSS feed link.)

The BBC is a “scandal,” he says, accusing the BBC of “stealing” content from newspapers. “We’ll be suing them for copyright.” He compared the BBC’s alleged copyright infringement with uploading a TV show to YouTube. Earlier (~4:45), he asserted that “we believe [the doctrine of fair use] can be challenged in the courts and barred all together.” Claims like these suggest that the man is demented, if he indeed believes the words coming out of his mouth.

In an abrupt reversal of his diatribe about intellectual property theft amongst search engines — and contrary to the rhetoric of many in the entertainment business — Murdoch said he believed the piracy is under control in most countries. Why, then, would there be a need for a “three strikes” copyright law (he lauded the new French law) and why would he suggest it as a world standard? (Was anyone from NewsCorp on the secret U.S. copyright team?)

The second half of the interview focuses on FOX News and political reporting in the U.S. You are warned.

My comment on a MediaShift article on Net neutrality, Why the Future of Online Speech Depends on Net Neutrality:

Google and Microsoft already pay “metering” fees — that is, they pay more for bandwidth than a firm with 1/1000th of their bandwidth usage. No one (that I know of) is saying that network neutrality means that the cost of transmitting 1GB of data should be the same as the cost of 1TB.

What network neutrality means is that Comcast can’t privilege its bits over bits from Blip.TV.

“Network neutrality” would be better framed as “non-discrimination” — just like Verizon, for example, can’t privilege Verizon phone calls over T-Mobile’s or AT&T’s. (Geeks should not name things.)

We need all infrastructure owners (cable, fiber, copper) to be considered “common carriers” — not just the telecos. This would mean that they would have to lease their infrastructure to other organizations and they would not be able discriminate based on the origin of a bit.

That’s not the case in the U.S. today. The cable industry has successfully convinced Congress that they should be exempt from common carrier law. The resulting law — someone probably has calculated how many millions in lobbying it cost — gives them an economic (competitive) advantage over telecos as that “last mile wire” becomes our pipe to our connection with the rest of the world: “television” and “movies” and “phone service” and “newspapers” and “radio” — and-and-and.

We have to separate content (the bits that represent text, photos, sound, moving pictures) from the delivery channel. That’s in part because we (society) can’t afford to have competing infrastructure: multiple “cable” or “fiber” wires on each-and-every neighborhood street. That sort of competition is economically inefficient: infrastructure is characterized by very high fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs (the cost of attaching the line to one-more-house).