Live Tweeting News shows is fun, but existing Twitter clients don’t always make it easy to stay engaged. This is the first of series of articles on the unique challenges of live tweeting and how they’re overcome in the TweetWatch.TV application. To see how the application handles the challenges yourself, give the app a try. It’s free and runs in your browser so there’s nothing to install.
Retweets are a great feature of Twitter — it allows you to see updates your friends think are especially noteworthy. And it helps you discover updates and authors you might not otherwise come across. It’s a part of what makes Twitter “social”.
But even though retweets are a fantastic part of Twitter, when I built the live tweeting application tweetwatch.tv I made it easy for users to turn off seeing retweets:
Why did I do that? What made me think that turning off a core feature of Twitter is a critical requirement for a live tweeting application?