Comments on: The reviews roll in: New Retweet= #FAIL

By: mcwbr

mcwbr — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:22:41 +0000

Good suggestion. I intend to try your experiment. At the risk of eating crow, I'm going to bet right now that a 2nd newRT will also generate a doppleganger.

It has occurred to me that the “doppleganger” might actually BE the new RT—that it's not a kludge to make 3rd party apps work, it's a kludge to make the new RTs work. The Dilbert explanation is too long, but I had assumed the new RT would be a new weak entity in the database, with a pointer to the original tweet, a pointer to the retweeter and a date-time stamp. Maybe not.

By: mcwbr

mcwbr — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:22:41 +0000

Good suggestion. I intend to try your experiment. At the risk of eating crow, I'm going to bet right now that a 2nd newRT will also generate a doppleganger.

By: Shoq

Shoq — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:33:30 +0000

Very interesting. But now you have to test to see if the doppleganger is generated if you are the 2nd retweeter of the same item. If you're correct, I would think it must be, thus, that's a huge amount of replication. It could also be an interim bug, or a test. I would try it again in a few days.

By: mcwbr

mcwbr — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 07:00:50 +0000

…How do I know it's a copy? I created a 140 character tweet and new RT'd it. The copy was truncated. The new RT was not.

By: mcwbr

mcwbr — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:45:13 +0000

I found this out by experimenting with two accounnts: When you use the new RT, it also generates what appears to be a classic RT. You can only see it, though, if you do a search. It will not show up in normal home timeline of a 3rd party app such as TweetDeck.

Say I new RT @Sally. Sally will see it on the web, but not in Tweetdeck home timeline. (Nor will anyone else using a 3rd Party app) However, if Sally creates a search column "@Sally," she will see a copy of the new RT (Providing Twitter is not dumping my tweets because it's busy)

If Sally is using a browser and clicks the @Sally sidebar, she also won't see the RT. But she will if she does a search "@Sally."

I think this RT copy was meant to be a kludge that would allow 3rd party apps to see the new RT. But it's not working for some reason. I can only speculate that it has to do with a database stored procedure that is called from the API, and that the same stored procedure is called from the sidebar link. The stored proc fires a query that for some reason filters out the retro RT generated by the new RT, so the kludge doesn't work.

Back when Twitter was asking for comments about the new RT, I informed them of this. It should be a simple thing to fix, but so far they haven't.

If you do a search on "@Shoq" you will see a new-style RT I created to demonstrate.