Why Retweet works the way it does

http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html

by tortilla • 17 years ago

53 25 17 years ago

evhead.com

techiferous3• 17 years ago

My twitter doesn't have this retweet functionality. I guess they haven't launched that feature yet?

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

They are rolling it out to some users.

techiferous3• 17 years ago

I read that, but the blog post is dated September 21st. I guess I expected their beta testing of the feature to last only a couple of weeks and that they would have enabled it for everyone by now.

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

There wasn't anything exclusive about doing something easy like a conventional retweet button, and this upgrade. They should have done the former then the latter.

The main advantage, by far, of this retweet implementation, is that twitter controls everything. The value of the retweet data is astounding. It might make their service viable - compared to the tyranny of chronological views of everyone that could be their downfall.

We need to find good content, and bubble it up. You can't just have realtime to do realtime search. You need content. Currently, twitter has an extremely poor estimate of what is good.

Let me take this opportunity to also gripe that favorites should be MUCH more prominent. They need to incentivize them by showing a count or usernames next to each tweet. And let me reorder tweets based on their being marked a favorite.

bjtitus• 17 years ago

I agree with your statement about favorites. I think, if they promoted them, they would be a great way to help rank content. I think this, combined with retweets could really help bubble stuff up to the surface.

Part of the issue with retweets is that the whole network will become more noisy and people will have to get used to that, I think this is partly a mistake. It could be fixed by allowing users to favorite cool things and retweet things they REALLY wanted to surface.

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

They could make a setting to only show retweets if more than N people have retweeted it. I'd love a similar setting for my current stream that relies on favorites.

Come to think of it, I could make that in a few hours...

timdorr• 17 years ago

You've hit the nail on the head with the favoriting feature. That's basically what this is:

Favorites - Click a button on a tweet and it goes into a list of tweets on your account

Retweet - Click a button on a tweet and it goes into a list of tweets on your account AND it shows up on your followers' timelines AND you get stats about how many other people retweeted it AND you get notified when your tweets are retweeted AND you can view just the retweets of your friends.

Retweets, as Twitter has implemented them, are just favorites upgraded. I think a lot of the controversy would go away if they hadn't co-opted a term from their users and ended up using it in a very different way than it had been defined.

An idea to avoid the commenting controversy: Allow an @reply following a retweet to show in your followers' timelines, even if they don't follow that user. Since Twitter won't show you @replies by your friends to users you don't follow yourself, that would be a good way to expose those discussions in a relevant way. UI-wise, there could be a small "comments" box that opens up when retweeting that just posts this @reply as a status update. Best of all, no API changes or backwards compatibility hacks.

joshuarr2• 17 years ago

My biggest issue to the new retweet feature is that I can no longer add a comment with my retweets. Most of the time this is a deal-breaker for me.

niyazpk• 17 years ago

You can always retweet the old-school way. It is not deprecated.

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

It can never be deprecated only banned (i.e if twitter doesn't accept tweets with "RT" in them)

joshuarr2• 17 years ago

Yeah, I do - that was bad phrasing.

slig• 17 years ago

I find it incredible hard to add a comment with the remaining chars (original tweet length - 'RT @username')

bhousel2• 17 years ago

I think this is a deal breaker for a lot of people.

It's gotten to the point now, I think some people think RT stands for Reply To.

True, you don't have much room at the end of the tweet for your reply, but most people will just add a simple "LOL Yeah!" or something like that to the end.

This is the main reason I recently pared down my list of people that I follow - I just don't want to see all the personal conversations that other people are having.

More proof that users will just do whatever they want. People didn't use @Replies or Hashtags the way Twitter expected that they would. It's the same for RT.

nooneelse• 17 years ago

You can put the comment in your next tweet and use a simple acronym at the beginning to reference what you are talking about... RTLRT (regarding that last retweet).

milestinsley• 17 years ago

I've always been skeptical of Retweeting. As the article mentions, it's responsible for diluting the quality of your news stream. Any value-add from the sentiment of a Retweet is offset by the sheer noise-to-signal ratio and redundancy from repetition.

The new feature is a step forward. It seems that it formalizes the Retweet syntax into, what is essentially, a vote for a Tweet. This is primarily what Retweeting has come to mean anyway.

I hope this encourages more original content on Twitter.

jordanbrown• 17 years ago

I think this is great but again ill be waiting for them to allow comments in the retweets. For now I may just be quoting instead of retweeting.

joshwa2• 17 years ago

Besides the commenting thing, something I haven't seen covered elsewhere is that I won't have any idea WHO retweeted the thing that shows up in my timeline. The authority (and, indeed, just the personality) of the person recommending the tweet has a lot to do with whether or not I care, or what my expectations for a link in that retweet might be.

EDIT: looks like the screenshot in ev's post was misleading-- it does show who retweeted:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/hate-it-or-love-it-twit...

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

Isn't it supposed to add "retweeted by x (and x others)" down at the bottom by "from web"?

I thought that's how I read that it was going to work... I don't have the feature yet, so I can't tell you.

joshwa2• 17 years ago

the screenshot in ev's post didn't show that, but now I see that the screenshot on Techcrunch does. That makes me feel a bit better.

tibbon• 17 years ago

As someone data mining Twitter, I have no problems with this and it makes my life 100x easier. Matching up RTs before and tracking them was hell.

bhousel2• 17 years ago

Not sure if it will help you much - people will still continue to RT the old way.

Why Retweet works the way it does

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