Twitip

Recently I got into an interesting discussion with @nhangen and @rockyourday about the new retweet function. While I’d experimented with it, I wanted to see how I could make it work for me. What I discovered was a plethora of posts pointing out the flaws in the feature.

• Strangers were showing up in your stream
• It was taking away from the community driven aspect of the site.
• You couldn’t add commentary

Now – these concerns are valid. However, what most people missed that this is an improvement on the old system. We now have more choice. Duncan Babbage says it best in a comment on outspoken media:

I suggest that you need to see Twitter as two separate things, an underlying infrastructure and then secondly their own web interface which is just one out of many clients that can be used for the service. At an infrastructure level, they have added a new feature that didn’t exist before. It doesn’t take away at all the capacity to continue to RT as you did before.

The perceived flaws in the new system only exist if you ignore the original method of retweeting. However, it all depends on how you choose to share others’ tweets. If you go to a different comment stream on Scoblizer, Nick Halstead said identified two distinct ways people retweet:

1) Content Sharing – You want to share a link to your followers, in this case you want to be able to definitely want to add commentary.
2) Tweet Repeating – I.e. you see a tweet that is funny/interesting/whatever and you just want to repeat it to your own followers.

Most of the resentment of the idea centers around the first use – content sharing. People like to be able to share the content in the way that suits them. However, as Ev Said:

But just as Twitter didn’t have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.

This option gives the user the way to share content in the way that suits their audiences needs. This is especially beneficial to those with official accounts. It also gives you more choice when it comes to listening on twitter.

Content Sharing:

You can’t add anything to the conversation using the new method.

The main issue that people had with this was that it changed the microsyntax associated with content sharing. @mattimck pointed me towards a really useful post by Chris Messina about the new microsyntax for twitter. In it, he shared four methods of attribution and linked to a useful wiki.

Now – all this sounds way too technical. The link mentioned above is really useful because it gives you additional ways to attribute the author in your tweet .

With the new method, you directly retweet the content without being able to change anything. You can’t add commentary. You can’t add cute smily faces and find fun methods of transferring authority with the tweet.

You can track how people share your content without the need for third party tools.

Some of the criticism focused on how 3rd party tools already measured some of the statistics. The benefit of the new method is that its included in the metadata. I’m hoping more information is included as twitter starts expanding to allow corporate accounts.

Protects the content shared.

People often edit retweets to include fake links and even fake comments. This is spam and can be damaging to brands. People can still create this type of content but the new features offer a level of protection.

Can prevent attribution confusion

There are a number of issues with this. The main one is when people would respond to the person sharing the content. However, many people are feeling uncomfortably with ’strangers being in their stream.’ This is an understandable concern, but it is the same content that was being shared previously.

There ARE a number of problems with the new method:

• No implied trust
• No visibility if multiple people retweet that content.

You have to decide which method is best for this purpose.

Repeating

This feature excels when you simply want to repeat someone elses tweet. However, many people felt that this method is different from content sharing and should have been named something else.

The main problem seems to be around the naming.

Robert Scoble suggested that twitter should NOT have called this “retweeting.”

Instead they should have called it “sharing” or “favoriting” or “liking.” In reality this is a copy of liking features that FriendFeed has had for quite a while.

The main problem with this is that twitter already has a favorite feature.

I use this feature frequently for when I want to simply repeat someone elses content. It also has forced me to take care when adding other information to the content I share.

Listening:

The main way it has benefited me is that it cleans up my twitter stream.

It reduces the noise.

• Can choose what people to ignore retweets from
• Don’t see same tweet multiple times

I have used this extensively to clean up the noise. It means I can continue to follow the really noisy people and even add them to lists or tweetdeck groups.

However, as Lisa Barone pointed out, it also has flaws. Now that people have the choice to block retweets, it means that people lose the reach they have. It can also put people in a weird position if they don’t want to block all our your retweets.

Your thoughts?

I was initially against but the new feature but now I am really excited about it. This is a tool for making retweets easier for some. Its not going to change the entire ecosystem.

Do you agree? Has this post changed how you will be using it? Let me know in the comment section.