Gentlemen, start your engines! WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner. unlike WordPress 2.8, which mark Jaquith describes as the Snow Leopard of WordPress since most of the basis of the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was complete rewrites and optimization of the infrastructure that ran WordPress instead of providing lots of new features in the same way Apple’s new OS X release is a focus on improved performance instead of features, WordPress 2.9 brings major new “bling” to the table. As a reminder of WordPress 2.8, you can see the writeup that Jonathan Dingman brought us last time around.

Themes: the_post_image()

Theme developers have a new piece of functionality that have become extremely popular in themes these days. As blogs have evolved from journal form into entities that can be very magazine-like, the use of thumbnail images has also grown. Typically, this layout is achieved through the use of custom fields that must be manually created and populated. No more!

As of WordPress 2.9, if you use the built in image uploader, then WordPress handle this for you. Theme designers that wish to support this feature can add the template tag the_post_image() to their themes to achieve proper placement as required by the theme layout. The template tag can optionally take a “size”, which is one of the WordPress default sizes: thumbnail, medium, large, etc. if none is provided, it defaults to your preset thumbnail size.

Conveniently, if a theme is enabled for post thumbnails, the only “feature” currently offering this support in WordPress, then a new “meta box” will be displayed on the Write screen allowing you to assign a post image.

Themes: Register Support for WordPress Features

This may seem to be an obscure feature, and typically, it’s pretty simple to figure out what I’m talking about just by looking at the header. In this case, it’s a bit more obscure because it suggests a feature that is introduced in WordPress 2.9 and then only for a very niche purpose. I can see this being built out over time, and plugin authors can supply their own use cases.

The concept is simple. if a feature exists — in the core, the only use case is for the thumbnails I described earlier and it is called ‘post-thumbnails’ — then a theme can declare support for the feature using the add_theme_support() function in the theme functions.php. it can only be declared in this file and it requires a feature be assigned a name. As I mentioned, with WordPress 2.9, there is only one feature that is named and that is post-image. Plugin authors can provide their own new functionality using the require_if_theme_supports() function.

Themes would then enable support for the feature by including the following in their functions.php file.

We’ve used the function_exists() check on the add_theme_support() function to ensure backwards compatibility with WordPress installations prior to WordPress 2.9. Similarly (and possibly confusingly in this context), before you would have to check for the existence of a plugin by using a function_exists() or class_exists() piece of logic and loading it if the class or function did exist, but now there are on/off switches to get it done.

Users: The Trash Can

On Windows, they call it the Recycle Bin. On Macs, it’s the Trash. In both cases, the feature exists to help people recover from accidental deletions. We have all had those moments where we nuked something we had no intention of nuking. with WordPress, accidental deletions have been permanent. In WordPress 2.9, everything is recoverable now with a new Trash feature. When you delete a post, page, category, comment, or any bit of content, it is moved to the Trash where you can decide whether to pull it back at a later date.

The Trash Can view. From here, content can be restored or deleted permanently.

Trash collection is done every 30 days by default, but it is possible to change this by editing your wp-config.php file. Add the following to your config file to change trash collection to every 7 days. Modify as needed.

Users: Image Editing

One of the hot new features in WordPress 2.9 is image editing. now don’t get me wrong. This isn’t Photoshop. And it only support basic functionality at this time. However, image editing will allow bloggers to crop, scale and rotate images from right within WordPress. From the media library, you can edit images by clicking the Edit link under an image, and then clicking the Edit button on the individual image page. This brings up an interface like what is shown below.

The WordPress 2.9 Image Editing Screen

Users: oEmbed

oEmbed, as described at oEmbed.com, is a specification that allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and others to provide data for consumer applications like WordPress about media. So by including an Embed (Use the File uploader and choose “From URL” and paste the link to the page that contains the media, not the media file itself) in a post or page, WordPress can retrieve the relevant specs on the media file and formulate a properly formatted embed accordingly.

Below is an embed of one of my Flickr photos using oEmbed.

Below, is an oEmbedded YouTube video (which itself is kinda hilarious).
youtube.com/watch?v=ZGp220EQUis&feature=popt00us0a

If you don’t want to use the GUI for this stuff, you can simply wrap the URL to the media page in embed shortcode tags like this.

The list of supported oEmbed sites in WordPress are as follows:

• YouTube (via oEmbed)
• Blip.tv (via oEmbed)
• Flickr images and videos (via oEmbed)
• Hulu (via oEmbed)
• Viddler (via oEmbed)
• Qik.com (via oEmbed) — never heard of this site, but it was listed on oEmbed’s website, so…
• Revision3 (via oEmbed)
• Google Video (via an internal handler)
• PollDaddy (via an internal handler)
• DailyMotion (via an internal handler)

That said, plugin authors can add new providers if they want by using the oembed_providers filter or override altogether with the WP_oEmbed->providers property.

Plugins: Custom Post Types

One of the strengths of Drupal has been its ability to have multiple types of contents contained in objects that all look alike to PHP. WordPress has supported a variety of content types as well, but it has not been nearly as flexible making WordPress a blog platform with some additional support for pages and attachments. Technically, the only post_types that WordPress has supported have been post, page, revision and attachment. while it has technically been possible to add new post_types (like podcast, mp4, or tutorials – they could be anything, really), it has been a chore and required plugin developers to handle quite a few moving parts in order to make it all work properly.

No longer. Plugin authors now have API to register new post types, opening up the possibility for even more creativity and uses for WordPress.

get_post_type()

The get_post_type() function can only be used in the Loop. it returns the type of post a post is. Keep in mind, I’m using post loosely. All content in WordPress is kept in the posts table thereby inheriting the name “post”, but post is also a kind of content that is associated with blog content (as opposed to page which is a pseudo-static page, attachment which is information about an image or file uploaded with the media uploader, etc).

get_post_types()

The get_post_types() function will return a list of all types of post content. by default, this will be post, page, attachment and revision. Refer to the source code for optional arguments that can be used to control what kind of data is returned.

register_post_type()

As a plugin author, you can use this function to create a new post type. The first argument is the unique handle you want to assign to the post type – let’s call it podcast – and the second argument is an array that contains additional elements. The key one here is an exclude_from_search, which by default is set to true. You actually probably want to set this to false unless you really don’t want this additional content searchable. see below for example usage.

There is currently no user interface for post types. There is a patch in for UI that will likely be included in WordPress 3.0.

Plugins: Comment Meta

There has been a variety of meta tables in WordPress. Meta tables, like usermeta or postmeta, are database tables that contain information about the type of data that is stored in WordPress. it allows plugins and WordPress to assign metadata, such as user roles and capabilities, to pieces of data thus extending that data. now, there is a comment meta table as well.

Though it is unclear how plugin authors will seek to use this table, the fact that it is available is a major deal as it essentially provides meta tables for every piece of content in WordPress now.

Plugins: Metadata API

With the addition of a comments meta table, it has become effectively redundant to duplicate functions throughout WordPress. You have a get_post_meta() function that does the same thing as a get_usermeta() function except they query data from different tables that also look identical except for the data stored in them.

In WordPress 2.9, there is an entirely new Metadata API that can be used to retrieve data from any of these meta tables.

The add_metadata() function takes a meta type (‘comment’, ‘post’, ‘user’, etc), the ID of the content type, the key and value of the metadata and whether the information should be unique or not (true or false).

You can also use update_metadata(), delete_metadata(), get_metadata() and update_meta_cache() for further wrangling. Refer to wp-includes/meta.php for full documentation.

Themes/Plugins: Theme System Modification

A lot of messiness has been eliminated in WordPress 2.9 theming. for one, new template opportunities exist. now, instead of looking for a template file called category-x.php, tag-x.php or page-x.php, where x is the ID of one of those types of content types, it will look for these templates second. The first template that is now looked for is based on the slug. So if you have a category, tag or page called foo, the first template to be sought after would be category-foo.php, tag-foo.php, or page-foo.php. if none of these templates exist, then the ID-based template file is looked for.

Additionally, plugin developers can register new directories for themes to be located with the register_theme_directory() function.

System: Database Repair Script

The database occasionally needs a good spring cleaning. other times, the database needs a repair. WordPress ships with a new script that will do just this. it is housed at /wp-admin/maint/repair.php but in order to use it, you need to create a new (or modify if it already exists for some reason) constant in wp-config.php.

System: Minimum Requirements

PHP 5 is not required yet. That’s coming in WordPress 3.0 will be increasingly implemented over time. but MySQL requirements have been boosted from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 4.1.2.

Bonus coverage

Other interesting things in WordPress 2.9.

• JSON compatibility, before only beneficial to PHP 5.2, has been backported for use in WordPress
• New ‘Undo’ button when using the Visual Text Editor
• A new sanitization API (with functions like esc_html())
• The emoticon system can be altered using the smilies_src hook.
• Bulk Upgrading of plugins
• Filesystem optimizations pertaining to FTP/SSH etc.
• rel=”canonical” for single posts and pages aiding in SEO
• Minify Admin CSS making for quicker (and smaller) page loads
• Bunny Tags and Jeromes Keywords Importers removed

How Chrome could complement your business as a companion PC

If you can get away with using only Web apps while on the road, a Chrome OS equipped netbook will be worthy of consideration. It’s worth pointing out that Google’s definition of “netbook” deviates broadly from its origins. Google thinks of a netbook as a slim inexpensive portable computer having a full-sized keyboard and touchpad, decently sized screen, long battery life, and solid-state storage. as a companion PC, a Chrome equipped netbook is an IT person’s dream. Chrome OS keeps itself and all of its plug-ins up to date; you never need to worry about updating it.

When it boots, Chrome runs a checksum on all of its binaries. if something is off because of malware or corruption, your computer is automatically and transparently reimaged from the cloud. You can forget about resource hogging anti-malware apps. Also, locally cached data is encrypted. if your netbook were stolen, it would be very difficult for anyone to recover any personal data. when you replace your netbook, all of your settings and data are right there. in fact, your entire environment is replicated from the cloud on any Chrome netbook you log into.

The Possible Future

It’s not difficult to see how the Chrome OS could become wildly popular on netbooks. A growing number of companies, such as Genentech, Motorola, and Salesforce.com are already using Google Apps, and could see immediate benefits using the Chrome OS on a companion PC. For those who already work in Google’s Web apps, a Chrome OS-equipped netbook will be worthy of consideration. However, such companies appear to be the exceptions that prove the rule, since they’ve already bought into the ecosystem.

Werner Herzog is the kind of daring director who shoots hisdocumentaries (”Encounters at the End of the World,” “Grizzly Man,”"Little Dieter Needs to Fly”) like narrative films and hisnarrative films (”Rescue Dawn,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Aguirre: The Wrathof God”) like documentaries. Forever chasing what he calls”ecstatic truth,” Herzog shoots fast, captures only what he needs,and incorporates locals. he dislikes rehearsing and refuses tostoryboard (”It’s an instrument for the cowards who don’t trust intheir imagination”).

So when Herzog cast the glamorous Eva Mendes as the prostitute-loveinterest in his refreshingly hilarious take on the tired cop genre,”Bad Lieutenant: Port of call new Orleans,” he was not so welcomingwith the demands made by her business manager, agent, and attorney.”She was apologetic and said, ‘Yeah, they demand the startreatment.’ I said to her, ‘Eva, nobody in my film is going to be astar. not one. But whoever steps in front of my camera is royalty.and that includes not only Nicolas Cage; it includes an extra inthe background,” says the Academy Award-nominated director.”Whoever is on my screen is royalty.”

German-born Herzog has the distinction of being the only directorto shoot professional films on every continent, includingAntarctica. out of his 50-plus films, he has never once gone overschedule or over budget, even coming in under budget four times. “Iwas $2.6 million under budget on ['Bad Lieutenant'], and now theproducer wants to marry me,” jokes Herzog, who shot three films,staged an opera in Spain, and published a book, “Conquest of theUseless,” this past year.

“It sounds as if I’m a workaholic, but I’m not,” he says. “I workquietly and steadily.” In “Bad Lieutenant,” out Nov. 20, NicolasCage gives his strongest performance since “Adaptation.” AsTerence, Cage terrorizes prostitutes, gangsters, and little oldladies, wielding his “lucky crack pipe” as often as his gun. Thebizarre story is mesmerizing because Herzog puts his signature onevery frame. Herzog likes to keep the cameras rolling beyond thescript and punctuates the story, as he often does in other films,with hallucinogenic close-ups of wildlife like iguanas, fish, andalligators.

“I think we always sensed that there was a dark, subversive humorin the screenplay. as vile and debased the character gets, the morehe should enjoy himself, so there’s such a thing as ‘the bliss ofevil,’ and then it creates a strange humor. People laughed andresponded, which is wonderful to see,” he explains. “Nicolas Cagevery often had complete liberty, like in jazz music, to have hisown voice, to improvise, so those are real, convincing moments inthe film.”

Cage Match

Cage says his first collaboration with Herzog was “a perfectmarriage” and credits the director with having the “guts to let medo it.” Herzog used a Bavarian proverbial saying to clue in Cage onthe more gonzo moments. “I would say, ‘This is the scene where youshould turn the pig loose,’ ” Herzog says proudly. Cage more thanobliged, even calling his performance in “Bad Lieutenant”impressionistic versus his photorealistic Oscar-winning performancein “Leaving Las Vegas.”

“A lot of people like to say things like ‘over the top.’ You can’tsay that about other art forms. You can’t say ‘over the top’ with aPicasso or a Van Gogh, and why can’t it be the same with acting?”challenges Cage, whose character does coke, crack, and heroin inthe film. “And so when I think about it in those terms, ‘LeavingLas Vegas,’ yeah, I had a couple drinks. I wanted to. I had someprescribed scenes where I said, ‘I’m going to get drunk andanything goes,’ and I’m glad I did it. But with ‘Bad Lieutenant,’ Isay that this is impressionistic because I was totally sober and Iwas looking at a landscape from over 20 years ago, and I wasn’tsure I could do it. It was a challenge, but I believe that thefilter of my instrument would give you something more excitingbecause it was impressionistic.”

Herzog used casting director Johanna Ray on this film and his nextfilm “My Son, my Son, What have Ye done,” both of which featureMichael Shannon (”Revolutionary Road”) and Brad Dourif (”Lord ofthe Rings: The Two Towers”). “She has the wisdom that very few inthis profession have, and she understands casting the way I alwaysunderstood it,” Herzog says of Ray. “Casting has always to do notjust with casting a role; it means casting a texture. I would seeseven actors for one role, and every single one of them wasexcellent.” The classic Herzog player was Klaus Kinski, whoseferocious talent matched his ferocious temper. The two collaboratedonly five times, but in a way they defined each other artistically.Herzog explored his relationship with Kinski in the documentary “MyBest Fiend.” he loves actors who have a great, lasting presenceonscreen. for instance, when Shea Whigham (”All the Real Girls”)auditioned to play a small part, Herzog was not initiallyimpressed.

“Then I had this spontaneous idea. Let’s try once more, and I wanthim to be defiant. whatever is thrown at him, whatever insult, hewould say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,’ and all of a sudden, this mantransformed himself into a fantastic character. he was immediatelyon board. He’s so wonderful that you pray and hope to see him againin the movie. and when you do, everybody is kind of applauding.He’s a quintessential wonderful surprise during auditions. and theydo happen,” recalls Herzog, who also cast Fairuza Balk, JenniferCoolidge, and Val Kilmer in “Bad Lieutenant.”

Hanging with Lynch

“My Son, my Son, What have Ye Done” is based on a real San Diegoman who stabbed and killed his mother with an antique saber. Thefilm, executive-produced by David Lynch, will be released inDecember and boasts yet another quirky, solid ensemble of actors.So did the two iconic filmmakers do much on-set bonding?

“There’s no real bonding,” Herzog says, smiling. “David Lynch isinvolved but not as a direct player. he felt proud to present thefilm and have a little bit of eye from the distance of theproduction. I had the feeling that, yes, this is a fine way toconnect not really forces but connect a common spirit.” Herzogremembers how much he loved Lynch’s “Eraserhead” when he first sawit at a midnight screening; he even told his good friend Mel Brooksabout it afterward.

” ‘There’s a phenomenal talent out there. You must see the film.The name of this director is David Lynch,’ I said. and Mel justlaughs hard and opens the door and says, ‘Do you want to meet DavidLynch? I’m producing his film ["The Elephant Man"].’ we walked afew doors down, and he opened the door, and there’s David Lynch. Sothat’s how we met. of course, we kept an eye on each other’s workfor a long time and respect each other very, very deeply. It’sstrange because we are so different in character and so differentin our private lives. It almost looks like a contradiction, but itis not.”

Herzog isn’t just making films. for more than 20 years, aspiringfilmmakers have come to the director asking for advice. So hefinally put together his own Rogue Film School, which begins with aseminar Jan. 8-10, 2010, in Los Angeles. But don’t look for it onthe USC, NYU, AFI, or UCLA class schedules.

“I was invited by universities, but I said, ‘No, I would rather gointo an abandoned quarry in the Mojave Desert than link with anexisting film school,’ ” says Herzog. “It will be completely andutterly wild, rogue, guerrilla-style. if you want to learn how tomake films and how to do it against all odds and have the couragefor your own dreams, then you’re right [for this]. The usual thingsI do not care about: credits in films or academic achievements. Isaid, ‘I prefer people who have worked as a bouncer in a sex club,’because they know about real life and they probably can transformit better than somebody who comes from college and has learned itin a film studies class. It’s all on the website[roguefilmschool.com/seminar.asp].” The seminar will besmall, and Herzog has already received hundreds ofapplications.

“It will be pretty wild, and I will do it at infrequent, rareoccasions,” he says. “I have to limit it to a very small amount ofpeople so that everyone can address his own visions and obstaclesor her own dreams.”

About This Renovation. And Advertising.

As you may have noticed over the weekend, Bwog has received several much-needed upgrades to its publishing software. the renovations will allow us more flexibility in the site’s configuration as well as increase Bwog’s compatibility with third-party applications and search engines. Things you’ll particularly notice: Google Reader and RSS feeds will no longer have strange characters; comment threads will now be nested (fear not, the “track comments” button will return soon); and the anti-spam filter is no longer a test for color-blindness.

We are also excited to announce the introduction of advertising on Bwog. With more than 2.5 million pageviews from its core of regular visitors each month, Bwog is an excellent way to get your message to the Columbia community, and we would be glad to help you make that happen. You can contact us at editors@bwog.net for more information, but otherwise, you can see a screenshot of the new ad setup after the jump.

Sincerely,

The Bwog Staff

For those of you without eagle eyes, the ads are above the “Events” and “About Us” boxes.

Tags: ch-ch-ch-changes, meta, new things
15 November 2009 @ 10:24 PM

• I think it’s silly to require an email cuz it’s just one more pointless thing i’ve gotta invent here, but all in all, the changes seem like good ones

  • My RSS feed no longer displays strange characters when reading Bwog. It no longer displays ANY characters, because FeedDemon (which is powered by Google Reader) and Chrome won’t load it.

    Seriously, this has to be fixed!

• can we go bakc ot the old one

  • i hate those stupid spam filters! i much preferred the old bwog one.

• Until we get HAXXOR YOUR P3n15! ads?

  • If you have medically sound information on how I can haxxor my p3n15, I would be willing to pay top dollar for it.

• One small criticism: what happened to tags? Those were hilarious.

  • Oh, wait, it’s only this post that lacks ‘em. I’m an idiot.

  • Seconded. let us bask in your pithy wit, Bwog!

• the new comment system sucks. and seriously, the old antispam filter was an enlightened implementation as opposed to inferior to best practice. it wasn’t annoying to deal with and it stopped spam. just because everybody else uses recaptcha doesn’t mean it’s actually better. in fact, it’s a right pain in the ass.

  finally, what happened to “our favorite comments”? that was a fun game. if you don’t bring it back, i might just have to march into kent and demand a refund. sure, they have nothing to do with it, but it was a key part of the columbia experience, which now feels empty and hollow.

  …and what’s with all these people using my pseudonym? i step out for five minutes and everything goes to hell. christ.

  • and it even fucks up the whitespace. ugh!

• 1. There should be a more visually pleasing way to separate comments. the previous design, though flawed, had large spaces between which made it easier to tell when one comment ended and another began. a simple rectangle around individual comments should do the trick, though there are other ways to do this. Gothamist (gothamist.com/2009/11/15/house_cat_terrorizes_family_in_dram.php#comments) has a nice color scheme.

  2. This design plays well with Google Reader, way better than the last one did. One thing though: the image in “Something’s Missing” (bwog.net/2009/11/14/somethings-missing) is larger than the view area; while it may auto-resize on the website itself, you might want to fix it for RSS feeds.

  3. I think anonymous comments, inappropriate as they sometimes are, do add something to Bwog posts. It would be nice if we could still have the option of commenting anonymously, alongside an option to comment with some sort of credibility (perhaps with a Facebook log-in), instead of the weird middle-ground that’s currently being taken with the required (but not verified!) email address that is needed at the moment. SF Curbed does a good job of this, allowing both Facebook log-in and anonymous commenting, and greys out the anonymous comments to incentivize people with something important to say to log in so their comment doesn’t get lost: sf.curbed.com/archives/2009/11/13/comment_of_the_day.php#reader_comments . I am not at all well-versed in the area of blog publishing software, so I don’t even know if it’s possible to adopt a system like that, but I think it fits well with a college blog, since most of us have Facebook accounts.

  4. Though I hate almost everything about IvyGate (ivygateblog.com/) and have stopped reading it because it’s just so bad, one feature I do enjoy is the “Recent Comments”. When Bwog’s being slow on content, sometimes I check the comments on recent posts to see if anyone has added anything interesting to the discussion; adding this feature would be really helpful for other people like me who like to keep tabs on who’s commenting on what.

  Well this was a pretty long-winded and not-well-organized post. Hope it helps.

  PS: I think the audio captchas are hilarious.

• where is the track button? that thing was so useful

• A few things:
  1) Why the hell do you need my email? if you’re gonna do that, at least let me have a log-in or something so I don’t have to re-type my email every damned time I comment. But seriously, why do you need it?
  2) reCAPTCHA is death. at least you guys have made it big enough that it isn’t complete death, but for the most part, it can take up to 5 tries (or refreshes) until you get the goddamn thing right. Give me an option: colorblind, or recaptcha. One of the things that made bwog comments great was that it was pretty much stream of consciousness: type a name, type a comment, type a color, done. Now there is thought involved: type a name, type the email that you don’t care if bwog spams, figure out what “website” means, type the comment, then figure out that goddamn recaptcha.
  3) Bring tags back
  4) Bring “favorite comments” back
  5) “Website” is pretty damned uninformative. Do you want us to put our website there? or a link? What the hell?

  • One cool thing I’ll admit: my browser can auto-fill the name and email. Granted, I don’t want it to auto-fill my name, but at least I won’t have to type in my email again.

  • As President of this Fine University, I gladly use my personal email address to comment on this Fine Internet Establishment.

    • I have to admit that this comment would’ve made me laugh harder in the old font/structure. That settles it for me i guess

• Has the ship sailed on the p3n15 haxxing? just checking since I haven’t seen anything more about it.

• I think the updates are great. Yay for switching to WordPress! Good choice.

  Instead of the CAPTCHA you may want to consider just using the Akismet plugin that’s already installed in WP. This way, no captcha (colorblind or not) is required. It’s truly a great and sound service as well.

• Is there some other way to prevent spam? I’m terrible at CAPTCHA. maybe you could have “what shape is this?” Easier than looking at scribbly words and colorblind friendly.

• I miss our Favorite Comments

• Sure, this new comment system is good and stuff, but the important thing is – where’s Harmony? I’ve been looking everywhere for it? is it on 125th? I’m so confused.

  • • Where is this God? can you help me find God? How far or close is God from here? And is it next door to Harmony?
      Where is Harmony? And for that matter, Satan?
      Help me plz.

• Agree with so much:
  -Favorite comments gone? WTF.
  -Track button now.
  -Bring back the old spam blocker but update it to block the Harmony Hunter too.
  -Bring back the crown for on campus posters!

Leave a Reply

Retweeting goes to the heart of what Twitter is all about, because it exposes users to interesting topics, blog posts, or news items they may not have otherwise seen.

For the uninitiated, a retweet is a way to rebroadcast another twitter user’s message. Originally, you had to copy the username and message into Twitter’s text entry box and type the letters RT in front of the message. If the retweet took up less than Twitter’s 140-character limit, you could also add your own comments. Now, with the new retweet feature, you can rebroadcast messages in just two clicks.

Retweeting is currently available only on Twitter.com, but third-party developers do have access to the new feature so it should be coming to your favorite Twitter client in the near future.

Like many other features on Twitter, the custom of retweeting started with Twitter’s community of users before the company formally adopted the practice.

But unlike other grassroots Twitter features such as hashtags and @replies, there are things to love about Twitter’s official retweeting function, and things to complain about.

The Good

Less Noise: Sometimes a popular link or comment can be reposted by any number of Twitter users you follow. If you’ve already seen the link, retweets like this can plug up your Twitter stream with a lot of noise and no added value. Now, the same retweet sent by multiple people you follow will only appear once in your Twitter stream. (Click for a closeup of the illustration.)

Granular Controls: You may love to see tweets from your sister, but what if she sends out way too many retweets? Twitter has got you covered by allowing you to turn off all retweets from your sister. You’ll still receive her original posts, but all those annoying RTs will be gone forever (unless she uses the old school RT method, that is).

Context and Discovery: Whenever you see a retweet, Twitter will present you with the original, unedited tweet next to the name and photograph of its author. This means you may see a lot of unfamiliar faces popping up in your Twitter stream from now on. The advantage of seeing all those new users is that you’re immediately exposed to new users, and you may even choose to start following some of them.

Retweet Sidebar: If you’re worried about missing the latest RTs, just click on the “Retweets” filter in the right-hand sidebar on Twitter.com. This will bring up three different tabs to see recent retweets by other people, your retweets, and who is retweeting your messages.

The Bad

No Added Comments: You may be getting better context by seeing original tweets, but now you can’t add your own comments when rebroadcasting these messages to the world. No more quips like, “this is hilarious!” or “LOL” or “so true, yet heartbreaking.” But don’t worry too much, because this may only be a temporary state of affairs. Williams said editing and commenting on retweets could be integrated into Twitter at a later date.

If you feel you can’t retweet without putting your own stamp on it, you can still use the original copy-and-paste method.

What’s Missing

Follow/Unfollow Button: Now that you’re seeing all these new people in your Twitter stream, it would be nice to have the option to follow them without navigating to a different Web page. Let’s say someone you follow retweets an interesting message from PC World’s Matt Peckham. If you wanted to start following him, you’d have to navigate to Matt’s profile page and then choose to follow him from there. It would be so much easier if you could just choose to follow new users from your Twitter stream instead. Some third-party clients already do this, and it would be a great addition to Twitter.com.

Twitter’s newest feature may not be a welcome improvement for everyone, but if you value greater exposure to new voices over adding your commentary then you’re going to love the new style of retweeting.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul).

Original story – pcworld.com/article/181924

Copyright (c) 2009, IDG News Service. All rights reserved. IDG News Service is a trademark of International Data Group, Inc.

From its very inception, TwitterTwitter faced complaints from the peanut gallery about its 140 character posting “limitation.” Over time new services sprung up to address the perceived “short-coming” of the microblogging service, from TwitLonger to Maxitweet to Glide Engage: essentially Twitter with 1,400 characters.

Some folks will probably get some value out of those services, but I’m going to make the argument that Twitter is the unique and special snowflake that it is precisely because of its 140 character “limitation.” If brevity is the soul of wit, we are all facing an unprecedented opportunity to be hilarious all day long. Let’s not squander it!

Creative Limitations are Good

In some ways it’s natural to always want more. We’re an all-you-can-eat society that’s always-on, and we don’t take kindly to limitations in almost any form.

People had the same reaction when Flickr launched video uploads with a 90 second time constraint. At the time it seemed like 90 seconds just wasn’t good enough for anything. The family reunion, junior’s graduation, and cousin’s wedding could simply not be uploaded to FlickrFlickr in their entirety.

And looking back on it now — aren’t you glad? There is something about imposing limitations that forces us to stop, reflect, and often edit the material we’re trying to share before simply hitting send (tweets about what we had for lunch or “I’m here” not withstanding!). Conversely, it helps us appreciate all the value and meaning that can be packed into a small space — whether it be language, video, or other medium.

In the case of Flickr, it didn’t take long for people to take up the call and find creative new formats that really worked within the 90 second constraints. The long portrait is a style that may never have emerged without that particular constraint inside that particular culture. Promotional postcards and other new inventive formats emerged out of this constraint as well.

The same is true of Twitter. When faced with the need for an economy of language, you’re forced to periodically think twice about what exactly it is you’re trying to say. Sometimes it may be pointless babble, but even pointless babble has a rightful place in the pantheon of human communication. And when you really are trying to impart something meaningful in a short allotment of the human language, it can be an unexpected and valuable mental exercise that, in its own small way, helps hone your ability to communicate with your fellow humans.

Brevity Keeps Twitter Low-Obligation

We’re expected to keep ahead of the overflowing inbox, the voicemail, the neverending torrent of RSS feeds, the FacebookFacebook messages, and will even occasionally get a cold shoulder if we haven’t read that friend’s blog post about a big life change. It’s too much! Some of us who remember back when the carefree days of proto-blogging were all about fun and the pure enjoyment of connection — before the business and the advertising and the VC money came flowing in — now appreciate all the more the low-obligation social cloud that Twitter really is.

The cycle, of course, has started again — many professional bloggers and those in the tech industry and elsewhere now consider Twitter a business tool more than a social activity. Even so, I can be away from Twitter for hours on end and feel absolutely no compunction to go back and read the tweets I missed. Nor is there any social expectation to do so. That’s refreshing!

Twitter is one of the few tools and social sites I use every day that I don’t feel the need to “keep up with” — it’s just a river of highly relevant information flowing past, and I can dip into the stream whenever I wish. It’s still completely opt-in, and the sheer volume of tweets afforded by short status updates is to thank for that lack of obligation.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio is Kept Manageable

The same brevity that keeps Twitter low-obligation keeps it relatively manageable in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Sure, there’s no shortage of boring tweets you wish you hadn’t read, but a) there’s a cure for that and b) at most you’re out what, a few seconds? Think of how many times you’ve gotten halfway through a long blog post before realizing it wasn’t worth it. Think of how many books you’ve started and never finished.

At least with Twitter, you have a hard time wasting gobs of time on things that are truly uninteresting. Yes, you may “waste” time following all those links to those funny cat pictures, but that’s still time “lost” to something you on some level wanted to do. Curtailing the effect of “interesting but not necessarily productive” infostreams is a different problem from trying to avoid those timesinks that leave you feeling like “that’s 30 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”

Moreover, people complain about the banality of Twitter enough as it is. Can you imagine how much more banality some people can fit into 1,400 characters and beyond? And the psychological overhead of having to figure out which output is worth spending time on and which isn’t? Brevity can act as its own filter in that regard.

Source Agnosticity

Twitter’s 140 character limit was originally based on the 160 character limitation of text messaging. The net effect of that limitation is that it doesn’t matter where the heck you post your Twitter updates from — it’s extremely platform agnostic.

Being based inherently on the SMS length limitation ensures that Twitter works absolutely brilliantly on mobile devices. It’s one of the few social services that essentially works just as effectively on your phone as on the web interface (even some natively mobile social services have a disparity between what you can do in the mobile app versus what you can do in the browser). That puts Twitter out ahead of the pack of burgeoning (or trying to burgeon…) mobile social services like foursquare and brightkite, in part because the simplicity everyone is so quick to decry makes it abundantly usable on the go.

The other benefit is global accessibility. SMS is a technology known and used around the world, ensuring Twitter’s availability practically everywhere without having to overcome issues other web apps may typically face, from censorship to outright blocking to technological incompatibilities. We witnessed one manifestation of the power this affords during the recent Iran elections.

The mass proliferation of Twitter clients too has been in part thanks to its simplicity. There are no messy formatting standards to contend with and display, no rich media incompatibilities to overcome, no surprising paginations or blinking tags — just 140 characters of text in any given update. Not only does that make it easier for a developer to whip up an app, it also makes our eyes happier.

Short is Not the Death of Long

Much like every new communication technology has prompted dire prognostication about the inevitable demise of the Old Ways, there is no shortage of punditry regarding Twitter’s hastening the decline of civilization. Won’t our children’s brains be malformed if they only ever have to come up with 140 character chunks? Won’t SMS abbreviations and LOLspeak be the death of language as we know it?

Just like TV didn’t kill radio and the internet hasn’t (yet) killed the printed word, neither will short kill long. Status updates and long-form reflections are not mutually exclusive, and both have a place in the human communication buffet. If anything, the short form turns out to be an extremely effective distribution method for the long.

And as for chatspeak, there’s an argument to be made that subversion of the language requires some level of mastery of the language. If we imagine these short forms as essentially dialects, then research on multiple language-speakers might be brought in to back up the idea that being fluent in two or more sets of communication “codes” can strengthen, not endanger, one’s ability to process language.

Short bursts of communication also provide a key element of what is actually “conversational” — in real life, people aren’t standing about at cocktail parties spewing off full blog posts and waiting for onlookers to submit comments. It’s a back and forth exchange, typically in short bursts. And if someone violates this social norm by excessively soliloquizing, we label them “a bit of a talker” or at worst, downright rude — someone to potentially avoid. And though it’s dangerous to start attaching the label “pointless” to short, less than earth-shattering statements, we as a species actually derive value from those short connecting segments of conversation. Even the pointless babble can nonetheless establish and re-establish ties with people we care about.

I’ve stated a case for Twitter’s 140 character limit, and would love to hear your feedback. Technological constraints are nothing new, and it’s my feeling that the imposed brevity makes Twitter a nicer place to hang around. What do you think? Would Twitter be twice at good if Ev and Biz would only raise the level cap to 280? Let us know in the comments!