To retweet is, according to Wikipedia, to 're-post something posted by another user on the micro-blogging service Twitter'. Standard retweeting, ie clicking the 'retweet' button on Twitter.com or various Twitter clients, is easy enough. One click and the original tweet is automatically retweeted. Old school retweeting, ie copying a tweet and adding 'RT @username' to the start is, however, an art all of its own. Both versions need to be used with care. So here are some words of advice for the discerning gentleman or lady retweeter.

• Editing: Do make sure the retweet makes sense to someone who may not have seen the original tweet in context. For instance a retweet of 'It really is bright tonight' could become 'Venus really is bright tonight'. Some light editing, such as changing 'and' in the original tweet to '&', to allow for the Twitter character limit is fine. As for correcting spelling and grammar, well I'll leave that to your discretion. Obviously, try to keep your retweet, including the 'RT @username', within Twitter's 140 character limit. (Old school RT only)
• Commenting: Enhance a retweet by adding your own comment. The syntax '<-- my comment' at the end of a retweet is standard practise. (Old school RT only)
• Frequency: Don't retweet too much. An account with nothing but retweets is a bad thing. A retweet should mean something, it should be a recommendation to your followers, not a dumb reposting of another user's content.
• Privacy: Don't retweet someone who has protected their tweets without asking first.
• Multiples: If you are retweeting something that several people have tweeted about, a web link for example, try adding '(via @username1, @username2)' to the retweet to give credit where credit is due. (Old school RT only)
• Client: Choose a Twitter client that allows you to do 'old school' retweeting as well as standard. Most decent ones will.
• Uniqueness: If you want to retweet the latest blog post from @stephenfry or suchlike twitterati then fine, but hundreds of other people will have already done so and all your followers probably follow them already anyway. Try to make your retweet something different, shining a light on a gem of a tweet that may have passed others by.

The Internet isn't easy to use, despite all the efforts of software companies to simplify it. The web is complicated by its very nature and using it can be fraught with problems. These problems can be highlighted when you're using an instant online messaging service such as Twitter. Make a mistake and hundreds of people will see it. Instantly. There wasn't a word or phrase for this phenomenon, so I've invented a new one. Yes, yes I have, you can't stop me. 'Twonk'. There, there it is, as defined below:

Twonk - noun. A mistake made in the usage of Twitter.

Here are some of the variations I've come up with:

Auto-twonk - noun. A tweet containing words incorrectly auto-suggested by a virtual keyboard.

Career-twonk - noun. An offensive tweet posted from the poster's employer's account.

Tweepstats.com generates stats for twitter users, with details such as hashtags used, websites linked to and top words tweeted. Here are a few tips to get the most out of the site:

Humans tweet and automated computer scripts tweet, but what about machines, what if they joined in? Would the automatic sharing of a virtualisation of mechanical events and real-time sensor data be a grand version of the Turing test or just an anthropomorphism of hardware?

Imaging you're running late for a train. You could glance at the twitter feed for your line and see real time updates from each train; "Just left Birmingham, 5 minutes late, four coaches.." In your feed would be your personal video recorder tweeting that it's about to record something. You realise you wanted to record a program, so you @reply to it and the program will be waiting for you when you get home.

From a user's point of view getting information from a twittering machine has several advantages. Many twitter feeds can be monitored at once. No need to run different apps on your iPhone to check the time of your taxi, train and plane when setting out on a journey. Just follow them on twitter to get all the updates together. Tweets are public and accessible from an array of devices and many users will probably have a twitter client running anyway.

The future is already here. Check out my Twitter list of machines that are tweeting right now, ranging from clocks and telescopes to bathroom scales and a cat flap.

I've been doing some coding based around the XML feeds from twitter.com for a while now and have hosted a twitter account analytics page which has become moderately popular. I thought it was now time to set up a dedicated website for it, so ladies and gentlemen, please welcome tweepstats.com, where you can find out the how, who, what and when of a twitter account. Enjoy.

If you use Twitter and want to keep your Facebook profile updated with the occasional tweet, there is a great little application you can use called Selective Twitter Status, which will post updates to your wall only if you add the tag '#fb' to your tweet. This is a good idea if you’re twittering a lot and don't want to swamp Facebook with updates. It works with fan pages as well, which is very useful.

However, what if you have a personal Facebook profile and a public Facebook page and want to be able to update each one individually from Twitter? You could add Selective Twitter Status to both, but then all tweets that you tag with '#fb' will get posted to both, which is probably not ideal. Or, what if you want a group of twitter accounts, from individual band members maybe, to be able to update a fan page? This wouldn’t work with Selective Twitter Status as it will only look for tweets from one Twitter account. Well, the answer lies in a little creative use of the free online service Twitterfeed.

Microsoft has been very busy of late adding cool new functionality to the Xbox 360. Hot on the heels of the recent Sky Player update comes a whole new host of social media, music and video features for the console.

The latest update gives users with an Xbox Live Gold Membership access to Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm, as well as Zune on demand videos and movies.

As far as I know, this makes the Xbox 360 unique amongst gaming consoles, with a breadth of features not seen on any other machine. So, let's dive in and discover the cool and not so cool points about the new update. The devil is, as always with software, in the detail..

I've blogged several times recently with posts that run code that analyzes my twitter habits, such as how do I tweet and when do I tweet. After receiving requests on twitter (oh, all right then, request, singular) and not wanting to keep all the fun to myself, I've created a public version of my twitter analysis code. Say hello to Twitalytics!.

You can generate twitalytics for any twitter account you fancy. Perhaps just narcissistic self-analysis. Perhaps checking out how your friends twitter. Perhaps checking an account for spammy behaviour (lots of links, etc..).

Twitalytics uses the public feeds from twitter, so there's no need for passwords. Each generated twitalytics has a shortened URL and a tweet button, so you can easily share your results. Enjoy!

I think I know how I tweet, but can I be sure? Well, there's one way to find out - write some code to analyse my twitter archive. So that's what I did and here are the results.

My twitter style: