Reshare and Care

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Internet enables us to share information along multiple channels, I actively interact and share content through social media and networking sites. Social media refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. Through my social graph I distribute my online activity through multiple channels and website which creates a steady flow of information.

There needs to be a balance though as the negative side of sharing/resharing everything is the noise that is created. I have noticed that on Facebook since the homepage update I have actually lost friends which I expect is due to the information/feeds I share through the social networking site. Recently I experimented by resharing my Google Reader shared items from Friendfeed back to Twitter and noticed the negative effect there as well. I have now removed this feature as I don't want to create too much unnecessary noise on Twitter!

This is why I don't rate the retweet culture that is dominating the Twitter service at the moment. It's lazy and reminds me of the chain emails that I used to receive, the emails informing that if I forward I will receive good fortune or I will receive a phone call. You get the picture so I don't need to provide multiple examples! People are even prompting for the retweet in their messages which I also don't agree with as it should be down to the reader to decide.

I'm sure that many of you are familiar with URL shorterner websites, I would like to see one introduced that references the retweet in a way that it credits the original tweet. Like BurnURL but with the bar featuring source info, statistics (timespan of retweets) on who has retweeted and details on what's currently hot at the moment. Pat Hawks was proactive enough to provide this site and although it provides the ability to reshare to Twitter, Friendfeed and other services I'm looking for a site solely focused on the retweet. This then hopefully will cleanup the steady flow of Retweet, RT etc that regularly populate my Twitter feed and provide a method of tracking popularity!

Anyone have any further suggestions?

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