[guardian-dev] Retweet vs Repeat

[Nathan of Guardian]

There are some fancy diagrams on my blog, but I will put the text below
for discussion here, as well:
http://openideals.com/2014/10/09/the-difference-between-repeat-rpt-and-retweet-rt-on-a-mobile-sortamesh/

There are two behaviors I have been considering during my adventures in
human-powered mobile mesh these last few weeks. The first is Retweet or
Reshare, as invented by Twitter users manually (“RT @foo this is
important”) and then later on built directly into the Twitter platform
as a feature. The second is “Repeat”, as inspired by radio repeaters.

Retweet (RT) is meant as a human-powered endorsement of a message. The
meaning and content of the messages have been ideally verified, or at
least the source is trusted.

Repeat (RPT) is meant to allow a message to extend further in its reach,
by allowing the receives device to reshare it another 10 to 100 meters
from its current and future positions. It is an active way to
participate in extending the mesh, but it should not be seen as
endorsement of fact or an act of verification or trust.

A mixture of retweeters and repeaters in a crowd, can then extend the
reach of a message from 10m or 100m up to say, 400m in the drawing
below. A repeater might be a fixed device, say a phone or tablet with a
good solid antenna plugged into a battery pack or an outlet somewhere.

Diagram1

 

A retweeter is more likely a person in the crowd, moving through the
area in a variety of directions. As they continue moving however, they
will keep rebroadcasting their last few tweets, including the retweet.
As they encounter new receivers / lurkers, they will receive the
original message, and the mesh is now extended in a non
contiguous-manner.

Diagram2

The Gilgamesh app supports a simple two-tap feature to manually reshare
any status message you have received. Once this is done, your device
then rebroadcasts the message over its Bluetooth and Wifi radios, with
the expected “RT @900734 i am live on air” format. Also, remember beyond
this particular app, any user can manually set their Bluetooth device
name, be it a laptop or an iPad, to use a similar format. The app also
now supports an automatic repeater mode, that can be easily toggled off
and on. In this mode, *ANY* message you receive is automatically
rebroadcast, using the “RPT @900734 does the repeater hear me” syntax.
You can see this in the screenshot below.
device-2014-10-06-165429  device-2014-10-09-120044

Ultimately, because we are limiting this experiment to a very simple
plaintext status messaging system, we have made our lives very easy, and
made the possibilities of successful use quite good. Since we aren’t
concerned with routing internet protocol or creating a reliable LAN
network that can sustain HTTP, we can take advantage of ideas like
non-contiguous meshes, retweeting and repeating to extend the range,
reach and impact of the communications.