Finding articles on Twitter
I have strong opinions about retweeting, which seem to be the opposite of many other people's opinions about retweeting. I like new-style retweets. If I retweet someone, I want it to be clear that they are the original source of the tweet. If someone else tweets something terribly insightful, I don't want to see fifty old-style retweets of it. Finally, I would like "RT @joe RT @bob OMG, totally RT @alice I agree! RT @cheesemonger OMG you guys I loled!!1 RT @somedude this is lank insightful RT @dave The" to die in a fire.
Which it mostly has. When new-style retweeting was first introduced there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as some people were outraged that they were seeing tweets from people they weren't directly following in their timeline. Today, nobody seems to care anymore, and I seldom see a manual old-style retweet. Unfortunately, I see a similar problem with the automated sharing of articles.
As far as I'm concerned, the best way to share an article on site Foo on Twitter is this: 1) go to Foo's Twitter stream, 2) find the tweet which links to the article, 3) retweet it. Unfortunately, what most "share this article on Twitter" buttons that sites display (and encourage you to use) actually do is make you create an old-style retweet. It usually automatically includes the site's Twitter username, and of course it's a link to the site, so credit is not really a problem -- but duplication still is, and in my OCD opinion this form of sharing is far less elegant than retweeting the original, official tweet.
I made a bookmarklet which searches Twitter for the title of the page you're currently reading. It tries to autodetect and chop off the site name if it exists, and it loads the results in a new window (or tab, depending on your browser preferences). It currently doesn't limit the search to the site's Twitter account, because determining what that is is less trivial than extracting the title from the page. I may write a more complicated bookmarklet when I have more time. In the meantime, if you're as obsessive about Twitter etiquette as I am, enjoy: