Late to the party on this but it seems Twitter's ReTweet functionality is causing a bit of a stir.

Here is one suggestion based on what i'll call WriteOne ReadAll.

In WriteOne ReadAll you are only allowed to append up to 140 characters to the start or end of a tweet (whereever that may be... so FinalTweetLength - OriginalTweetLenth < 140). Those 140 are what is POSTed by the client *. This is the WriteOne bit.

At the other end however, is ReadAll. In this case you get to real all of the stuff that's been appended to a tweet by the people who have passed it on to you. Twitter can manage this bit - you as the retweeter don't need to send this stuff to Twitter as you're simply modifying the start of end of the tweet. So then you get much richer retweets with 140 characters but still get to see all of the context. Also because you can't modify the middle without breaking this flow, you don't lose attribution.

Example

weblivz I love this new retweet functionality!

friend1 Not rolled out to everyone though. RT @weblivz I love this new retweet functionality!

friend2 Yes but they are planning to release it over the next! month RT @friend1  Not rolled out to everyone though. RT @weblivz I love this new retweet functionality!

...

...

friend10 It's cool i can follow this conversation. Can't wait to see the new release. RT friend9 ................. RT friend2 Yes but they are planning to release it over the next! month RT @friend1  Not rolled out to everyone though. RT @weblivz I love this new retweet functionality!

*  If you modify the middle of a tweet it's back to ensuring the entire tweet length is 140 chars or less as you can't then easily transmit the delta. This is what we have today.

During the Celtic game today i had a discussion with my friend Andrew about Google Wave (i had an invite so was explaining it to him). I invited him but explained that Google are not actually processing them as invitations.

In fact they are calling them "nominations". So what does that mean. Well, consider this simple SQL query:

SELECT email, count(*) AS total
FROM nominations
GROUP BY email
ORDER BY total

This will essentially give us the people who have been nominated the most.

Is this important? Well, imagine you were to try and figure out the key to sneezers on the web - those people you should seed with invitations in order to grow your network and get the maximum amount of feedback. Does such a metric exist? Can you imagine the value to startups? Add some measurements such as what influence that person has in terms of invitation acceptance and then feedback from those invited - suddently you have a powerful way of targetting not only the most influential but, more importantly, those likely to provide key insight into your technology.

Is this not what every startup on the planet needs. Furthermore, is this not what every big technology company in the world needs to know?

Anyone else thing this is what they're doing? Maybe it's just taking a while for their bot to clear the queue ;)

He did this with some other kids at the River Festival in Glasgow. Cute :-)

He also appears in the Raven video halfway down this page.

There has been a lot of discussion in the last couple of days about retweet.com copying the client code from Tweetmeme.com.

The indication is that retweet copied verbatim some the Javascript code that Tweetmeme created - the uproar has surprised me a little and i have to admit to being a little surprised that you can be assused of stealing JS code that is basically cached locally on everyone's laptop when you use the service. I have read many times that one of the reasons the web proliferated as it did was because of the View Source option. Anyone can view the source of a web page anc "copy" the code as discussed here and here and here. The have been discussion on how to prevent this but short of obfuscating your code there isn't much you can do.

However, as Clay Shirky points out here "THE CENTRALITY OF OPEN HTML SOURCE TO THE WEB'S SUCCESS".

"The single factor most responsible for this riot of experimentation is transparency - the ability of any user to render into source code the choices made by any other designer. Once someone has worked out some design challenge, anyone else should be able to adopt, modify it, and make that modified version available, and so on.

Consider how effortless it would have been for Tim Berners-Lee or Marc Andreeson to treat the browser's "View Source..." as a kind of debugging option which could have been disabled in any public release of their respective browsers, and imagine how much such a 'hidden source' choice would have hampered this feedback loop between designers. Instead, with this unprecedented transparency of the HTML itself, we got an enormous increase in the speed of design development. When faced with a Web page whose layout or technique seems particularly worth emulating or even copying outright, the question "How did they do that?" can be answered in seconds."

This open source even extended to other areas such as the Shetland Times versus the Shetland News way back in the early 90's (when i thought that me having kids was surely 200 years in the future...). In this case The Shetland News gave the impression they were the source of stories but simply using frames and the like - something that has become pretty common now, more directly through RSS feeds.

In fact I remember a number of commercial projects in early "classic" ASP where actually obfuscated the code that we sent to clients on both the client and the server, only to be asked todebug or make changes and some poor bastard had to figure out what on earth was going on.  Wasn't worth the hassle.

So, add to all this the obsession with Open Source and openness in general and you start to ask "Is there really a problem here?".

Well, I really don't know. However there is an increasing number of bloggers irritated as what they see as the use of their information with attribution. In other cases there is use of others content and an indication there are aware of it existing at that location, when in fact they are not.

So, the answer seems pretty simply. You can (and by that i don't mean "should") copy, reuse, rebrand, hack, include pretty much all content on the web - unless the source of that content is a compant large enough to go after you (e.g. BBC, CNN etc). With code it's a little less obvious - what would have been the result if the copied code had been from a "view source, grab script" on BBC page?

There are, say, five options that retweet.com could have chosen:

1. Write the code from scratch themselves (does ANYONE do this anymore?).
2. Copy their code and attribute them in the code (via a comment in the header of the code).
3. Copy their code and attribute them on the web site (much more public ).
4. Copy the code and change it to make is less obvoius (most sites on the planet have done this at some point).
5. Copy the code and go with it (this is the one they seem to have chosen).

#2 is popular with coders but business people won't care - it's invisible to everyone non-technical. #3 is a step forward but again what does it really mean - the competitor site won't get any value out of it - especially commercial sites.

Is it REALLY that simple? If i copy all the Javascript and Css from a very cool site and stick it on a new domain to compete with them and have managed to get a much cooler domain name (coz we all agree that two sites being technically equal the one with better branding and marketing is likely to win) would the original site be happy with my little attribution that they were the source of my site? I doubt it. Depending on who they know you may get hell for doing this. Creating social web applications is as much about awareness as it is the application. You need a seed and whether you like it or not upsetting very well connected people can be your downfall... the argument that someone else did the same but had no consequences holds no water. Again it's about awareness.

The web certainly grew out of copying other people's code but in the social world a series of factors need to be plugged in before you decide whether the potential effect on your sites reputation is worth the coping of a competitors code. It's maybe not always fair, but it's the real world.

At the end of last week my sisters 4 year old son was diagnosed with severe learning disibilities. Previously they has said it was Autism but over the last few months they have been watching him and hence the new diagosis. Not sure how i feel - there is certainly a lot of work ahead, especially for my sister.

It got me thinking the same thing everyone who has a family or friend in such a position - what can I do to help. You immediately start thinking of specialists, experts you can visit, ongoing treatment and so on - the kind of stuff that requires money.

This quickly brings me to a reason often not talked about when interviewing entrepreneurs about their company - often (and i read this recently in an interview with Steve Wozniak) they are happy because they can buy family and friends a trip or a car. However i read less stories about cases when the success of an entrepreneur enables them to do something that has a real impact on their family and friends. In the case of very successful entrepreneurs you may create a foundation which can affect the lives of many thousands of families such as the Omidyar Network and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

However, as an individual, if ever one needs encouragement to work that bit harder when it would be easier to give up then surely the areas where you could really help are things to help you focus. After all, there's little other areas you can help and we know having gone through it all that with some cash in the bank things would have happened a lot faster.

Deciding to start a company is often described as a Brave New World and it is, but a Brave New World comes in many forms. Scorn not his simplicity.

No longer will I be posting at http://weblivz.blogspot.com and instead I will be posting all future updates to this blog. I hope to add one or two posts per week.