Hacker News Reader

Retweeting is something the twitter community has invented; there is still no built in functionality for it. As more and more people sign up for twitter, they have to continuously be educated on what retweeting is and how to do it. We are trying to make retweeting easier.

View on HN

Fair enough, why don't you create some variation of twitterpedia.com and put a lot more definitions on there?

The way we did it makes it more useful for the whole community, and helps ideas spread through twitter. It lowers the friction to retweet. Also, most users are not likely to go to a twitterpedia site, pleaseRT.me is viral by definition, and gets the idea right in their face.

Perhaps you could explain (on the site) what retweeting is and why it would make ones life better to engage in it. Perhaps you could also explain it to us here.

We will definitely be putting an explanation on the site. A good explanation can be found here: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_retweet

Basically, when you see someone tweet something you find interesting, something you'd like to share with your friends/followers, you copy and paste their message, and usually put RT @username at the beginning. This helps ideas spread through twitter. We're taking away the need to copy + paste, and putting the retweet request in the URL itself to help with the 140 character limit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com