Introduction On Twitter, a popular

Introduction
On Twitter, a popular microblogging service, directed conversations usually involve use of the “@user” syntax to refer to others and address messages to them; Honeycutt and Herring [9] examine this conversational practice. A subset of participants also uses hashtags (#’s) to mark tweets topically so that others can follow conversations centering on a particular topic. However, a third convention, known as retweeting, has yet to be analyzed.