Tweets¶

Retweets¶

All the retweets of this tweet. ThinkUp displays both a total number of retweets, and a list of all the retweets it has captured.

In some cases, ThinkUp may report a larger retweet total than it displays in its list of retweets. For example, ThinkUp might report a tweet has 58 retweets, but only show 40 of them. This situation can happen when Twitter has let ThinkUp know how many retweets there are, but ThinkUp has not captured every individual retweet.

How ThinkUp Counts Retweets

Twitter users retweet in one of two ways:

• They post a “native” retweet, where their Twitter client tells Twitter the tweet is a retweet and the retweeted tweet is unmodified.
• They post an “old-style” retweet, where a user or Twitter client simply copies a tweet’s contents and adds the letters “RT” to the front of it. Sometimes the retweeter adds commentary or edits the content of the original tweet when they manually retweet.

Therefore, ThinkUp captures retweets in two ways:

• ThinkUp captures the total number of native retweets for a particular tweet that the Twitter API reports. The Twitter API maxes out its individual tweet’s retweet count at 100.
• Additionally, ThinkUp uses a simple algorithm to attempt to detect old-style retweets. If a tweet contains the letters “RT” and a username and 25 matching characters from a recent tweet by that author, ThinkUp marks it as a manual retweet. This method doesn’t identify every retweet–for example, if the original tweet has been modified so 25 characters of it don’t match the original–but the ones it does identify are correct.

ThinkUp displays the sum of the total number of old-style retweets it has counted as well as the number of native retweets Twitter has reported.

The number of retweets ThinkUp displays is the sum of two numbers: the number of old-style retweets it has counted and either the number of native retweets Twitter has reported or the number of native retweets it has in its database (whichever is larger).