With act.ly petitions, I’m finding that a lot of activists just want people to retweet something, and it’s not necessarily a petition. People were actually targeting petitions at themselves just so they could use the other act.ly functionality, even though all they really wanted was for people to tweet some specific text in support of a cause. So I made act.ly retweets to better do that. You can use this for pledges, or links you want people to retweet, or your own email petitions you want people to tweet about… anything really.

It’s very similar to the petitions, it tracks the people who recruited the most retweeters, it lets you put a lot more information on the act.ly page (including videos and links to donation pages) than just the 140 chars. There is a digg-like embeddable widget you can put on your own site. You get the fun Google Map, and you can have the checkbox to follow you when someone tweets, along with auto-following anyone who does tweet.

Check it out: http://act.ly/retweets and tweet me feedback @jgilliam.

Also, Nancy Scola interviewed me about the first 3 months of act.ly, what’s working and what isn’t, for TechPresident this week. There’s some good info in there on effective ways to use act.ly petitions.