There are many niggle things about Twitter, one of which is when someone asks for something to be “retweeted”. When that happens I not only get the original, but others post the same thing again and again.

Retweeting can be a really useful thing and I am not discouraging it. I would say don’t just retweet just because someone asks, do it because you want to tell your followers, but other than that I would encourage it. It can result in people outside your direct Twitter circle finding out about something they will find interesting or useful.

I have had an idea to solve this. No, stop, come back, it might be a good idea for once. Why not implement a retweet feature in Twitter. It could work in a not to dissimilar way as favouriting a tweet. The difference is when a friend, or several of your friends flag it for retweeting it will appear once in your stream.

The only technical problem I can see is that if the tweet is not flagged for retweeting straight away the tweet could get berried in the past and missed. There are obvious UI solutions to this, and I would look at aliasing the original tweet each time, but with Twitters scalability problems this solutions need to be really really simple to implement.

Please do post any thoughts here, or on Twitter.

Do you use Twitter? Do you live in or around Newcastle upon Tyne? Do you fancy meeting other people who have answered yes to the previous questions in a pub for a pint? If the answers are yes, yes, please read on.

I am wondering if we should have a Tweetup. This would be just like when you tweet that you fancy a pint a couple of friends on Twitter join you. The difference is we give a couple of weeks notice so people can plan and not just a couple of hours as per usual.

The idea is not mine. There have been several round the world, and one is being run tonight in Preston. The format seems to vary some what, but I am suggesting we don’t try anything complicated and just gather informally for a chat. Restricting your sentences to 140 characters is optional. ;-)

So what do you think? Please let us know by completing this criminally easy poll.

Update: So that is a good solid yes. In my experience not all the people voting here will make it, and people who were not interested would not vote. That being said others will come, and we do not need any more than two people for it to be successful. I will seek some venue and day feedback next month and we can give it a go.