Method to retweet with comment

[IgorBrigadir]

It looks like “retweets with comments” are just like normal tweets, with a permalink to another tweet at the end. So POST statuses/update with a link to a tweet should work just fine.

[yhon_acurio]

Good answer, thanks IgorBrigadir,

I can confirm that a retweet with comment is a new tweet that contains (as message) the link of the original tweet. Currently, I cannot see that retweets count is incremented. So, I think we should use the “update” method and then, the “retweet” API method.

[ePirat]

No you should not. Twitter has no native support for Tweets with Comments, and the usual way to do a RT with comment is by tweeting like the following:

Cool Tweet! RT @username Hey this is the original Tweet!

Usually a link is not included. (That is no convention enforced by Twitter, just something that got common over time)

This will not increment the retweet counter for the target Tweet, you should pass the original Tweet ID to the in_reply_to_status_id parameter.

[andypiper]

This is correct. You get 117[*] characters to post your status (the same as updates with media attachments) and if you also then append the permalink to the Tweet, the official Twitter clients will render a quoted Tweet.

[*] how is 117 characters calculated? well, that’s 140 characters minus the value of short_url_length_https obtained from the help/configuration endpoint (currently 23). i.e. 140-23 = 117.

[ePirat]

Ah, is the embedded/quote Tweet in Tweet thing now the official way to RT with a comment?

[andypiper]

… well, you’re also right to say that this doesn’t increment the RT count, so if you want to track those then you’d still want to use a RT action rather than a quote Tweet.

[ePirat]

Thanks for clarifying Great new feature btw!

[edlea]

I’m following this approach (text + permalink), and the official clients render the quoted tweet from the permalink. However, they also display the permalink after the text, before the quoted text.

Looking at the raw JSON for my tweets vs those created by the official iPhone app, I can’t see any difference other than the “source” attribute of the tweet. Here’s an example tweet: https://twitter.com/edlea/status/598731818012139520

Is this expected behaviour?

[richardhyland]

The official apps use a quoted_status object like retweeted_status. This is present in the streaming apis but doesn’t seem to be present in the public rest api at this time.

[edlea]

My problem isn’t with the data coming back from the APIs - I’m trying to create quoted tweets from my app and am having the problem described.

[konradgrant]

I don’t see the answer in this thread. How do we use the REST API to Retweet with a comment?

It seems like ‘quoted_status_id’ might be related [link].

Here is a StackOverflow question on essentially the same thing.

[ePirat]

As already answered by @andypiper, a quoted Tweet can be created by appending the link to the Tweet quoted to the Status.
This is not exactly the same as the official clients are doing but currently as far as I know the closest you can get.

[konradgrant]

@ePirat: thanks for helping. It’s confusing that quoting the Tweet will not increase the RT count. As I understand, a “quoted tweet” is a status update where the content is like you said. It’s also confusing that the retweet API is not preferred.

Does the ‘quoted_status_id’ get incremented? If so, where does that field show up?

[ePirat]

The quoted_status_id contains the integer value Tweet ID of the quoted Tweet. It is not a counter.
The RT count will only increment for real retweets, not for quotes of the Tweet.

[craft_ryan]

Just to confirm - it appears there is no way to send a quoted Tweet through the API without including the full permalink?

When using the quote tweet functionality on Twitter.com, the resulting tweet is much cleaner looking without the permalink as seen here: https://twitter.com/TheMoEvans/status/618916711173980161. Would love to be able to remove the permalink when sending via the API :).

[richardhyland]

Even the tweets in the API the official client uses contain the permalink, they just remove it at the User Interface end

[craft_ryan]

Thanks for the reply Richard - however I’m seeing different behavior.

As you can see with this Tweet: https://twitter.com/feb22deploy/status/659412440409616384

It successfully embeds the quoted tweet - however you can see it doesn’t remove the permalink from the text of the Tweet even when its viewed on Twitter.com

[andypiper]

I think that’s because your link is not the last thing in the Tweet? might be mistaken though.

[craft_ryan]

Awesome Andy! You are correct, putting the tweet url link at the end does indeed result in it being hidden. Thanks for the clarification - never knew that was the requirement!

[andypiper]