Some fuss has been making the rounds lately regarding retweeting, the action of taking someone's message on a microblogging service (such as Twitter, where the term gets its name) and sending it out again from your own account. There are some who think this is a bad thing. For example, blogger Steve Rubel claims that retweeting is lazy and results in less creative thinking from service users.

I have to disagree, both as someone who retweets, and as someone who has seen retweets going by.

The issue is that not everyone on Twitter is connected to each other person directly. So what happens if one person has something interesting going on? Retweeting allows that interesting message to be shared to others that would not have otherwise seen it. My retweeting a message from a person in one of my social circles on Twitter allows it to be seen and further propagated by those in another circle.

People don't just blindly retweet, either. A message which is retweeted is one that has passed some mental filter in the retweeter, a filter that keeps out anything the user thinks would not be of interest to those in any of said user's other social groups on the service.

The claim that retweeting means that the system doesn't work is false. If you ask me, it shows the system works just fine, by allowing news to travel between social groups in a somewhat controlled fashion.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hey, You’re Breaking Twitter