I’ve discussed Twitter in a variety of capacities on AMPed but mainly within the context of using mashable technologies that include Twitter, but I have not discussed a feature of Twitter that sometimes is overlooked – retweeting.

What exactly is retweeting? Retweeting is taking a tweet that was originally sent by one person that you follow and you in turn forward it on to your own followers, usually with an added comment so that the new tweet would look something like this:

Awww RT@stephenfry Plus *eyelidflutter* Steve Jobs said “Hi, Stephen” *swoon*.

In this case I’m commenting on a tweet originally sent by @stephenfry, whom I follow and in turn, I forwarded that tweet to my followers along with my comment. Because of the format of the tweet, it is generally understood that everything before the “RT” is by me and everything after the “RT” is by the originating author. And this is accepted as the norm in Twitter communication for since time immortal (or 2006).

It is exactly like email forwarding, with the exception that you cannot selective choose who your retweet goes out to, it has to go out to all of those that follow you or none at all.

When Twitter first came to being, it didn’t have an official re-tweet option, at least not on Twitter.com. A lot of the retweeting that went on was done by hand, meaning simple cut and paste with formatting to make it fit within 140 characters. As Twitter, and obviously by extension tweeting, became more popular, applications and websites like HootSuite, Seesmic and TweetDeck started building tools within their clients to make retweeting easier, thus no more cut and paste! One could simply select the option to retweet a tweet and the application would do the formatting for you.

But then, everything changed. In the fall of 2009, Twitter announced they were going to do something a little bit differently: change how people retweeted. This may not seem like earth shattering details but in the context of how people use Twitter and for people who use Twitter.com, it was a big deal.

Here is what they did:
For ages, applications were already incorporating ways for people to retweet content, allowing people to style how they disseminated the information as seen by my example above. Twitter.com, sometimes late to their own party, decided to shake things up by adding a retweet option natively into the website. What this option did is that if you were reading your Twitter timeline on Twitter.com and saw something you wanted to retweet, the retweet option would re-post the tweet for you but as it originated from the author, with no option to restyle it or adding commentary. So, if I retweeted my example from above to my followers, what they would see is the tweet as it was originally sent by Stephen Fry with “retweeted by” appended on. The interesting thing about this new option is that for those who ALREADY follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, they would not see my retweet since it already appeared originally in their timeline.

Applications and websites have started incorporating this option into their software, giving users a choice to do it natively or to add commentary.

Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, explains the rationale behind the the new format and the ideology of how retweeting emerged organically.

So now that we’ve covered what retweeting is, how it’s used and how to use it, what exactly makes it powerful? There are a number of reasons (in no particular order):

1. It introduces new users to your followers that they may not already know. For example, there are a number of Twitter users who have become massively popular due to the viralness of retweeting, such as @ArchivesOpen and @UkNatArchives. The viralness of a Twitter account is not limited to an account that is for pure entertainment, as news & culture magazins, think tanks, research groups and individuals that I do not follow have appeared in my timeline, retweeted by people who think that information is interesting or useful.
2. It draws attention to a particular action, ideology or commentary that you believe in and want to share with your followers.
3. It illustrates something you agree or disagree with, but sharing the orignal tweet with your own commentary, thus drawing attention to something that may not have been noticed before.
4. Retweeting gives credit to sources, which again goes back to expanding your social network, either professionally or personally.
5. It creates conversations with your followers by them retweeting or responding directly to you about your retweet or by retweeting a tweet that originated from yourself.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg and there could be a series on the power of retweeting, but for now we’ll just cover the basics to lay the foundation on becoming a better tweeter. By understanding why people use retweeting, how to use it, what it does and why it can be so powerful gives you a better foundation to be a better tweeter and at the end of the day, isn’t that what everyone wants?

One of the great things about Social Networking is the ability to transparently publish information across various social networks simultaneously. When I update my personal blog, without additional interaction by me, updates are sent to my Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed accounts. This is done via the magic of APIs and the widgets that utilize the existing sites API information

API is short for “Application Programming Interface,” and essentially allows third party developers to create new ways, or mashups, of the existing technology with other technologies – hence the transparency of publishing my content from my blog to other sites. One could argue that this ability is at the heart of Social Networking since personally I’d be less inclined to re-post my content repeatedly on other sites, which means more work for me and also takes out the “Gee-whiz!” factor when introduced to new mashups or widgets that will do it for me.

The interesting thing about all of this, however, is that when it comes to Facebook, how I am regarded as an individual is completely different to how Archive Media Partners (AMP) is regarded as a business. On most other networks, business and individuals are treated nearly identical when it comes to creating a presence on that network but Facebook, however, has a different model. Facebook has always maintained that there needs to be a separation between the two, which is especially crucial with how Facebook disseminates personal information as well as the concern over privacy controls.

While that topic can be a blog post (or even a series!) in its own right, we want to look how to get a business’ information into Facebook with the same ease as an individual. The first example of this is having your blog automatically update to Facebook when new content is published.

With an individual account, there is a variety of ways to do this via applications native to Facebook as well as widgets that can be installed. For a business, it is a little bit trickier. Here is how to do it:

And you’re done!

You can go to your page and test that the blog entries are showing up, but this is probably one of the more elegant ways of getting your blog feed into your Facebook wall. You can also remove the feed if you decide not to use it or update/change the feed as needed.

For more ideas on how to use Facebook as a business, look at Mashable’s Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies that illustrates how other companies use Best Practices when using Facebook, including feeding a blog into a Facebook wall.

One of the things that makes social networking is the ability to comment and share whatever it is you’re reading or interacting with to others in your group, whether by email, Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking sites. On the flip side, one of the downsides is that for nearly every site you interact with, you almost always have to create a login to participate. This is not necessarily a bad thing in that it allows you to control what information about yourself that is available to the site admins, it allows the site admins to also gauge who is using their service and it is helpful if you consistently frequent the same sites on a regular basis.

Personally though, I’m fairly lazy. If I want to comment on a blog or a site, and that blog or site requires me to create a new login, I’m more apt to just not say anything at all rather than go through all the fuss of creating said account. In that respect, OpenID was created with this in mind by creating a universal login that if a blog or site allowed you to login with your OpenID, that’s one less account you have to set up. This is good in theory but in practice, as far as I could tell, it has not been used that extensively. Even major sites such as CNN and The New York Times still require you to create an account on their system to comment or to view special materials, which then defeats the purpose of using OpenID.

This is where Disqus comes in to fill the gap. Disqus is a commenting system that enables your users to comment on your blog or site by logging in via a network they are already affiliated with, such as Facebook, Yahoo! or Twitter (and even OpenID!). Users are not required to create another account on all-in-one service such as OpenID because it is assumed that your readers will have an account on another, existing system. With the rise of such services now making public their APIs, it is becoming fairly common to use your Facebook or Twitter account to login to another service instead of having to create an account on that particular service. For example, the geo-location social network BrightKite, uses Facebook’s API to allow users to login instead of creating a new account.

When we started AMPed, there was some discussion as to what to do about enabling commenting on the site, including but not limiting to time frame the comments would be open, how to handle spam and whether or not a person would be required to register. When I quizzed people as to whether or not they would use the commenting feature, many stated that they would but like me, refrained from doing so due to the having to create yet another account problem. Commenting is not just about espousing one’s opinion on a topic they were interested in but it is also about opening up a conversation. Blogs tend to get thought of as a one-way communique instead of as a community and that was something we wanted to change.

Disqus, in short, is awesome. Not only is it another widget that works directly out of the box but the transparency within the WordPress blog is fantastic. I didn’t have to go through and configure each post individual or hack PHP to get it work, it just did it on its own. As Disqus allows people to login and comment with Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and more, users are not relegated to creating an account on the system.

With Disqus, you then then control what systems people can login with, such as allowing only Facebook or Twitter, turning off anonymous counting. You can also, like the default commenting system within WordPress, decide when to shut comments off from older sites and how to handle spam. Disqus also allows trackbacks, like default WordPress, which they call reactions. This also allows you to see who is linking to your blog and why.

While Disqus fulfills our needs on AMPed, there are some glitches with how the system is set up. Here is what you need to know:

Bottom line: The integration into the website is flawless and it gives our readers more control on how they want to participate in our community, Disqus is a great gap filler on how to handle commenting on websites. While the installation of the widget was flawless and transparent, the managing and set-up of the widget is a bit clunky. But for the cost (free) and what it does, Disqus is a great tool to have in your WordPress widget toolbox.

The one thing that I love about technology is the discovery of something awesome regardless if it is software, hardware or a mash-up application that enhances my overall experience. But what makes the tech even more cool is when the technology just works the way it does without any additional futzing by me.

Keeping that in mind, one of my favorite widgets for WordPress that does just this is Twitter Tools by Alex King. Twitter Tools is kind of a misnomer in that it sounds like contains a suite of options for Twitter<->WordPress functionality when it really boils down to two things:

Why is this widget important? With Twitter having grown over 1000% in the last year, everyone and everything is on Twitter from national news networks, companies and brands, to celebrities and politicos and definitely not lastly, right down to Joe and Jane Anybody. The one constant thing all of them are doing is harnessing the way Twitter works and pushing beyond its boundaries by incorporating Twitter into their other social networks and web presences and vice versa. For companies and brands, this also means that they are doing outreach to clients, potential clients, staff and more by utilizing the power of social networking and integrating it into their professional lives. Why send just a company newsletter to clients when you can also keep them abreast of new technologies, updates, interests as well as interact with them in this new social playground.

What exactly does this mean? Social networking takes a lot of time and work, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. Let’s say Jane Anybody is on Twitter, Facebook, and has a blog. Let’s say she wants to be able to push her blog onto Twitter automatically without having to login to Twitter every single time she writes a new entry. Let’s also say that Jane doesn’t want to have to futz with shrinking the URL, rewording her title if it is too long and then reminding herself to login and to post to Twitter after she is done writing her blog entry. She wants an application this will do all of this for her with one push of a button.

This is where Twitter Tools comes into play.

As mentioned, Twitter Tools is the all in one client that will automagically push new blog content to your Twitter account AND will pull content from your Twitter account, which you can then showcase your Twitter-fu in a neat sidebar widget that you can add (thanks, again, to Twitter Tools) or as a daily post, which will post automatically to your blog.

You can search for Twitter Tools directly at the WordPress Codex, download and upload to WP-Plugins/ folder on your WordPress install or even easier, you can search for Twitter Tools via the Plugins->Add New search tab on your WordPress dashboard. The second install option is even easier as WordPress will automatically download and install Twitter Tools (or any plugin available via the Codex) without having to use (or know) FTP. Just search, select and okay the download and WordPress does it all for you — which is also pretty cool.

Regardless of which way you choose to download Twitter Tools, once it’s installed, go to WordPress Dashboard->Settings->Twitter Tools. From here, once you authenticate your Twitter account and change the option on “Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog” to “Yes,” Twitter Tools can be pretty much left alone. From this point forward, every post created on your blog will automatically ship to Twitter, with shortened URL, when your post is published to the blog. Twitter Tools also works with post-date (in the future) and pre-date (in the past) feature via WordPress but also keep in mind that in choosing either of these options, the date stamp on your Tweet will match the date stamp on your blog entry and pre-date entries will be fed into your Twitter stream appropriately, therefore they will not show up as “new” tweets in your timeline to your followers.

Here are some other nifty things about Twitter Tools:

Bottom line: Twitter Tools is an easy way to get Twitter integrated into your blog and to push blog posts to your Twitter account without knowing how to code, futz with extra settings or more plugins. It works right out of the box and can be installed and set-up within a few minutes. This is definitely a “Must Have” in your WordPress toolkit.