Twitter – Is it possible to display/retrieve the number of “original” tweets a user posted

tweettwitter

On Twitter, when viewing a user’s page, the number of tweets he or she posted so far is displayed:

Number of tweets displayed on user page

But it does not tell if those tweets were original tweets or just answers or retweets and how often this person posts original tweets. This is a stat that I would consider when I ask myself if I should or not follow someone.

So, is there a way to know those kind of statistics?

Best Answer

This is currently not an option. Besides the fact that Twitter has changed over time and things like retweets are handled differently now then they were in the past, it would be nearly impossible to accurately state if a tweet was "original". You would be hard pressed yourself to come up with a rule set that could be used to determine the originality of a tweet. Basically you would have to look at the content of the tweet and try to pull out the meaning; which is very hard to do with only 140 characters.

What I like to do is look at the last 5-10 tweets. If it seems like they tweet about things I am interested in (be they retweets or originals) I'll follow them.

What's great is you can always change your mind later and unfollow if they are not original enough for you.

Best of luck!