Help us to choose the best retweet icon
Yesterday we published our last update, including the new 'retweet' icon. This icon allows you to quote other people tweets, without having to write their @name and copy/paste the content of the tweet.
It has been a long awaited feature, asked for many of our users due to the increasing popularity of the 'retweet' practice.
At this moment it isn't supported natively by Twitter, so it doesn't exist an standard way of retweeting (like the @name for replies for instance). Most of people use the 'RT' or 'Retweet' convention, and in fact our first intention was to use 'RT' too, but then we heard about some alternatives that sounded interesting: the use of one single Unicode symbol to identify the retweets. Since we're using a communication system with one main limitation -140 characters-, it seems that makes sense to try to find the shorter way for all this stuff.
Following these recommendations we implemented the Unicode symbol for recycle: ♺. It represents perfectly what retweet means and is only 1-char long. The problem: it doesn't work under some circumstances: Windows or iPhone, for instance. :-(
So... we have to find an alternative and need your help to choose the better one. Would you help us? We start: our vote is for » , other Unicode symbol, visible for major part of OSs.
Comentarios sobre Help us to choose the best retweet icon
Why not just let the user pick in a preferance setting form themselves??? Seems like a simple plan to me!
Except the Unicode symbol is three bytes, and twitter counts bytes, not characters. So instead of two chars "RT", you're using three... :)
I think I agree with the tweetie developer that 'retweeting' isn't doing anything but clouding the conversation; via (or I've used ala) allows you to credit the writer and add your own response:
http://blog.atebits.com/2009/01/rt-vs-via-round-2/
He argues a bit on the recycle icon too, and I have to agree it doesn't fit the mold of tweeting. Just my two cents!
how about letting people choose what they want as an option=? the unicode sign also is not filtered by most RT sites, and the unicode sign as Matthias says takes three. ;)
I say go ahead with the ♺ (recycle) symbol. http://futuretweets.com/ seems to be able to implement it just fine with windows, so I think it shouldn't be a problem. you'll notice, also, that I just sent a tweet of 140 characters all entirely unicode via futuretweets, and it came through just fine - http://ow.ly/sVs - debunking the theories that unicode characters would actually take up more character space (i added spaces between some characters only to prevent the tweet from running on one line and being invisible beyond the twitter message area. otherwise, it would have looked like this: http://ow.ly/sVr)
DEFINITELY NOT Unicode since far too many people do not have support for unicode as standard in their browsers or for the symbol on their keyboards. This is especially true on mobile/cell phones which are used by a huge proportion of the Twitter community to support their Tweeting.
Further, not ALL phones, even fairly recent ones support the » symbol - my Sony Ericsson doesn't all for instance, but it DOES support (as do most phones of even 5-year-plus vintage) the ® character (ALT +0174 code) , which if one thinks about it is an easier to grasp connection with Retweet but ISN'T in your choice of options. Duh!
WHATEVER code is chosen, there is NO need for the @ symbol preceeding the username also, thereby saving another character i.e. rather than ®@BobLewis just ®BobLewis. All these possibilities of course presuppose action by Twitter themselves to support the change.
Sorry, ref the last comment, your web site is bi-lingual and not all in English and I read Nombre as needing my telephone number not my Twitter ID. Oops! Hopefully this time it will be correct.
Best regards.