Twitter is an interesting ecosphere to watch, and participate in.

At its roots the service is incredibly simple and designed apparently from the ground up to be that way. Things like replies, hashtags and retweets all originated from within the community of users rather than from Twitter itself. Even to this day there is no special recognition, or inclusion, of these community created identifiers by Twitter – that is left up the the Twitter client developers.

There are no hard and fast rules for how identifiers like hashtags or retweets are suppose to be used. After all how can there be when there are none for Twitter itself.

The problem is that what starts out as a useful identifier can very easily spiral out of control and become a negative. We have seen this happen with hashtags to the point that there have been Twitter messages that go by that consist of more hashtags than any message that makes any sense. ReTweets have to a point suffered the same problem but something more bothersome is in store for them though, I think.

One of the things about Social Media is that it allows us to have open and transparent conversation with others and businesses. This has provided an opening for the marketers and public relation firms to create another revenue stream for themselves as Social Media experts. After all every company needs; or is going to need, a social Media expert on call – just in case.

The thing that these experts have been pushing as the next best type of advertising is the idea of the company’s message going viral. That’s the hot buzzword for marketers and public relations people these days. Everything has to go viral. If it doesn’t go viral then you aren’t doing it right.

In other words just another natural organic event that happens of the web is now in the marketing cross-hairs and anything they can do to figure out how to make things go viral is worth a lot of money to them, and their clients. Along comes Twitter and a great community driven way to share stuff we think is really cool – otherwise known as ReTweeting.

Just a short explanation for those who don’t know the term retweeting is the reposting of someone else’s message from your Twitter timeline and by common agreement starts with a ‘RT’ at the beginning to indicate it is a retweet. Simple, concise and does the job wonderfully – at least until the top tier bloggers realize that it is a great way to increase readership. At this point I think retweeting begins to lose some of its appeal and the gaming of the retweet begins.

Then some really smart people figure out that – hey – this might just be the best way to get our clients message to go viral and do it with clean hands. I think that is one of the things that really bothered me when I read a post today by Dan Zarrella where he talks about using retweeting to artificially create memes and viral messages

Being that I come at this opportunity from a marketing background, I look to this analysis to build a framework for repeatably creating contagious memes, so this presentation from PubCon Austin aims to do just that for ReTweets.

Now don’t get me wrong I think Dan is a very smart man and I like reading much of what he writes, even if it does irritate me sometimes, but like he says he’s a marketer. For him Twitter is a case study in marketing trends and how best utilize (game) the service in order to get a specific message to spread as far as it can.

I just hate to think that at some point we’ll have to stand back and seriously question who Twitter is for. Is it for companies to try to get as many of their messages to go viral as they can by manipulating things like retweets? Is it all about brand penetrations and statistics?

Or is it about us?

About a conversation?

Will we be able to tell the difference, especially when we have people doing their best to fool us.