Social Media, Retweet | featured news

The words "four more years", coupled with a photo of Barack and Michelle Obama embraced in a hug, have become the most retweeted Twitter post ever. The US president tweeted the message at 0416 GMT, and it has since been retweeted over half a million times. It underlined the now pivotal role social media plays in informing and persuading potential voters.

Everyone's made a joke they thought was funny only to see it fall flat, but Park Jung-geun's attempt at humor could see him jailed for up to seven years in South Korea. Park, a photographer by profession, re-tweeted some messages from North Korea's official twitter feed, such as reports on the late leader Kim Jong Il's travels across the country and negative tweets about South Korea.

Are those who post unverified reports on Twitter playing an important role in the new ecosystem of news, or being irresponsible and indulging in gossip? That question goes to the heart of the idea of news as a process rather than a finished product.

You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web?

How do you measure influence on Twitter? While follower count is perhaps the most obvious metric, other activities, like the numbers of times you’re retweeted, provide a bit more insight.

One of the best things about Twitter is the way that it allows content and information to spread quickly across the network from person-to-person. This happened for two reasons: 1. because Twitter is a one-to-many communications platform and 2. because it allows for content to be easily repeated.

At this point, a fair number of Twitter users have the new retweet feature enabled (and if you’re not one of them, don’t worry, the rollout continues).

An avid Twitter user, Alana Taylor wrote a song about the social networking site and uploaded it to YouTube last April. Soon, her Twitter feed became flooded with messages linking to it.