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Last night on Twitter, I saw a pretty high-profile user retweet a message he’d received from one of his connections. It was high praise about this person, and was retweeted verbatim with no changes to the text.

My initial reaction to that was to ask the following question to the Twittersphere:

The responses came in thick and fast and they opened up a great stream of conversation for the next hour at least, with aspects to all sides of the original question.

 David Spinks and  Alex Tan opened up a great conversation around the question which you can read more of here.

From my own point of view, when I asked the question I was of the mindset that it leaned more toward ego as opposed to pride (or excitement at receiving praise). Did you really need to retweet the praise – couldn’t you just say thanks to the person who offered the praise?

But is that view right? Is it any different from having a testimonial page on a website, or asking for references for your LinkedIn account? Does the public conversation aspect of Twitter make it less “respectable” to promote your praise than a static site?

Someone mentioned that it’s like being at a cocktail party – you wouldn’t suddenly announce how great you are. Or would you?

So… is it ego, or is it pride? Is it being genuinely pleased or just being a pimp? Would you retweet praise verbatim about you? Over to you – the mic is yours.

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