I have to tell you a pet peeve of mine. It’s people who retweet all day long and never add anything of their own thoughts to my Twitter stream. I use this fun tool called Twit Cleaner and it happily allows me to find all of the people who only have retweets in their stream and unfollow them.
For those of you who don’t use Twitter the basic analogy is this. A retweeter is someone who demonstrates none of their own ideas but keeps repeating the ideas of the people around them. You can’t have a conversation with them because they don’t respond and you have no idea what they really think.
Please add your own thoughts to the stream. Create a blog and link to your entries, join the EduPLN and post resources there, or just start chatting away on Twitter with other people (or even yourself!) but please don’t post into my stream with your constant retweet spam. A retweet in my opinion counts as a thumbs-up to a great idea so the occasionally retweet is okay. Retweeting something which you really feel should reach a wider audience is fine too. Retweeting something to get your tweet count up? Pretty lame; you know who you are.
Ed says:
On the other hand… we’d like to welcome educators new to twitter and the whole experience can be pretty overwhelming at first. Many people just lurk and watch and listen, but don’t have the courage to participate. Once they are ready to jump in, perhaps retweeting things they find interesting is a first step, while building up confidence to share original thoughts and get involved in conversation. I still prefer that to people who tweet original comments about what they ate for lunch 🙂
September 26, 2010 — 5:57 am
David Wees says:
While I agree that retweeting is easier for beginners to manage when they start using Twitter, some of the people I remember had between hundreds and thousands of retweets. Also, how will the beginners know that nonstop retweeting is less than ideal unless we say so?
September 26, 2010 — 8:48 am