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A quick note: this is entirely non serious and not to be considered academic in any way. I've also written it very quickly.
I received a message on Facebook yesterday afternoon from @carotagg, after I sent her a tweet (on Twitter) to remind her to Tweet a bit more. Her response was that she had 'twat'.
This got me thinking in a linguistic way. Whilst tweet has been around as a verb for a long time (how long is an interesting discussion which @alexsteer has already documented), the new usage in relation to an internet service is rather different: The new sense of tweet is something which is done in an instant, rather than over a period of time (as birds tend to do). This is a very important grammatically, since it means that the the new verb has what linguists refer to as perfective aspect, rather than the imperfective aspect of bird song. This suggests that, at least in English, we might be more likely to refer to 'tweet' in the perfect tense (as opposed to the imperfect) for the new usage.
Is this an innovation? The 500 million word Bank of English at Birmingham University (a 'corpus' of real-life English that researchers can use to determine how words are used) contains 3 instances of 'tweeted' but, more surprisingly zero of both 'was tweeting' and 'were tweeting'. Evidently uncertainty about what the past tense of the verb is is due not primarily to this change is aspect, but also due to the fact that people just have not talked about tweeting in the past tense before.
(Of the three 'tweeted' concordances, two are in 'I tweeted', but dates from 1971 — well before the modern usage — and only the remaining one is clearly talking about birds, specifically, swallows).
My response was to ask my Twitter friends what they thought the past participle was. The result was this completely un-scientific study were quite surprising:
tweeted 3 twat 2 twote 2 twet 1 twed 1 twot 1
(Incidentally, I had more replies on Facebook than on Twitter, and those Facebook replies are included here)
Whilst the general tendancy would seem to be in favour of 'tweeted', it might be argued that the community has noticed the different aspect and decided that a new participle is needed for the specific sense. I have to say that, if Corpus Linguists are allowed to have favourite candidate verb forms, 'twote' sounds very nice to me: poetically Chaucerian.
No-one took issue with the original question and said they would use 'twittered' rather than a form of 'tweet', although, amongst the tweets indexed by Google, the ratio of 'twittered' to 'tweeted' is about 9:5.
Time will tell which becomes conventional.