A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE

The new release of Tweetdeck was released yesterday, and Iain Dodsworth and crew implemented (along with a long list of other new features and improvements) a small bit of microsyntax that he and I discussed a month or so ago: RE.

RE is based on the everyday notion of a RE — ‘in reference to’, or ‘with regard to’ — that business folks have used for decades in memos and email.

In the Twitter context, RE is similar to and complements RT. RT, as we all know, makes a copy of a tweet, and creates a ‘@username’ reference to the author of the original tweet, and prepends a ‘RT’ indicator at the start. RE, on the other hand, creates a URL that points to the original tweet, and does not copy any of the original tweet, and prepends ‘RE’ at the start.

The idea is that the user creates a RE with the intention of commenting on whatever the original tweet contained. Imagine that my pal @gregarious has tweeted something like this:

I think Jeff Pulver’s #140conf sounds great. Wish I were there.

and I might RE in this way

RE http://bit.ly @gregarious is one of many who wishes they could have attended the #140conf this week

.

Anyone wanting to know what @gregarious said will have to click on the link. And smarter Twitter clients in the future may provide some automated support for pulling together threads based on RT and RE in a sensible fashion.

At the present, though, we at least have an automated way to easily create RE’s, which takes several manual steps otherwise.

[Update: 9:58am — Note that RE can also be used to reference things via URL that are not Tweets, as well. For example, a pointer to a blog post.]