If you’ve been living in London for a while and experienced the ‘joy‘ of taking the public transport, you would’ve already spotted the pattern, especially for the Bus Service. It’s not rare when you have to wait for a very long time for them to come to the Bus Stop (although it says on the timetable, 10 mins interval), and when they come, they come not just one, but sometimes 2 or 3 at the same time!!! It’s just so absurd that I have now stopped asking why.

Ok, enough for the rant.  How does this remotely relate to Twitter Retweet?  Well, unless you are one of the Top Linkers, your Retweet rate, i.e. the number of your own Tweet being Retweeted by others, would be minimal to none.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you hit a jackpot, like I had yesterday.
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Twitter is on a roll this month!  As a matter of fact it has scored a Hat-Trick on new features.  First with the Twitter List , and then with the new Retweet, and the third by enabling Geotagging.

If you haven’t noticed yet, open your Twitter settings and you can find geotagging under Account -> Location section.

At the moment, this setting only affects the API, which means you won’t see any changes on Twitter.com.  But some 3rd party applications are already supporting it, including Seesmic Web, Foursquare, and a few others.

This location info, if turned on, will help a lot in segregating Tweets by geo-location.  For example, Twitter was already planning to use this to filter trending topics by user’s locality.  Third party apps could use this to show users who tweet near to your location, which is good for finding new followings.  Other example would be an online game based on location.  The possibilities are endless.

However, one important thing that you must consider before you tick that ‘Enable geotagging‘ box is, what implications would affect you and your tweeting by turning on this feature.  You know where I’m going, don’t you?  I’m talking about privacy.

You must again remember that, unless you make your account private, your Tweet, and all information that go with it, will be visible to everybody!  Indeed Twitter has updated its Privacy Policy to emphasis this important yet sometimes forgotten fact.

If you are not careful, this feature could become the Ultimate Stalker tool, not to mention a robber’s radar arsenal.  As a matter of fact, if you’re good in API programming (or have money to hire a programmer), you can built an application that all it does is monitoring people whereabouts and map it to Google Map.
That is quite scarry, and definitelyworth to ponder upon.

The thing is, I don’t really want to miss-out on the (geotagging) fun, but I also don’t want some stranger invading my house and stealing my stash when I’m not around (not that I have any valuables laying around mind. Well maybe my Star Wars novel collection).

What we really need, and this is my suggestion to Twitter, is an ad-hoc switch which we can turn on and off as we please whereever we are, without the need to go the setting on the web to change it.
What about a Tweet command code, i.e. if we tweet this special code, Twitter will change the setting for us automatically?
Or, maybe that’s just too complicated for Twitter to do.  Never say never.

Anyway, be sensible and be safe everybody!

As Twitter Team is rolling out the new Retweet functionality to a selected group, things are getting clearer everyday in terms of what the deal we are getting with this new system of Retweeting.
MediaSosial managed to be included in this beta roll-out, so I had a chance to try it early.

After having been playing around for a day or two, I have to say that Twitter has integrated the new functionality with the rest of the user interface quite nicely.

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Seesmic Desktop has been my main Twitter Desktop app since it was still in beta, and it’s ‘Release Early, Release Often‘ method really struck accord with me, especially because with every release it continues to give to the customer ‘what they need‘ (and not what the money-owner wants).

This new version 0.3 is also the same.  This one is a Release Candidate version, hence it is only available for registered users and not yet downloadable from the main website.  The idea is to give the registered users a taste of what to come and at the same time to get user feedback on the new features before it goes live.  It’s a great strategy, because in this case everybody wins :)

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