Where’s the retweet? Can you see it?
The big news today: Twitter will finally accept retweets and make them part of the built in system or simply put the Twitter home page. At first I was moderately happy about this overdue move until I read the fine print.
In future Twitter will let people block your retweets.
While the retweet blocking might appear as a desirable extra feature it has an obvious drawback: This is like the nofollow attribute for links: Nofollow was meant as an enhancement (to combat spam) but in the end it crippled the Web. Also this might be just the first of many filters to come. The next one could be to filter all “@” messages, or all messages containing links. Why? This way you could subscribe only to the stuff that really interests you. You don’t want to know about Matt Cutts’ cats? Or you don’t care for his fights with Graywolf… Block them! Wouldn’t it be nice? It would to some extent but the effect would be that your followers don’t listen really. They’d ignore large parts of your conversations.
Also Twitter plans to dump the “RT” acronym itself. You won’t recognize at first that a message has been retweeted because only a tiny text below will indicate that it actually was. Otherwise the message will look the same as other tweets. There may be some indentation or color difference but it will become more difficult to recognize a retweet and to count it. Does Twitter try to monopolize the retweet count?
OK, I might sound overtly critical lately but I get a little wary of Twitter becoming what Google is for search, a monopoly in microblogging as described in Slate Magazine.
Last week I suggested that a viable solution would be to collect your Twitter contacts in your favorite CRM solution. When Twitter gets messed up for other reasons than being off line you can’t do anything about it besides to stop using it. Many people by now depend on Twitter though. So the only real solution would be a distributed vendor independent open source microblogging platform that directly connects to Twitter. I’m talking data portability here. We need a way to export both contacts and messages in a real time way not just in a user front end way but for the whole system. When Twitter is down your favorite Twitter client isn’t working either. I’d imagine something like a peer to peer Twitter but without the huge media files. This should be far easier to build than the music sharing networks.
We’ve already seen cases of censorship and government interference on Twitter. So in future it will be crucial to make Twitter work despite the limitations of the current and upcoming system. It’s like the Slate article suggests:
Imagine all of the Web or the whole global e-mail system in the hands of a single company.
This can’t work out with microblogging either.
You already can filter out @’s.
OMG… don’t tell me.. but if they really stop / block the retweets… i guess there won’t be too many tweets in twitter i guess.
:p
No matter whether I agree or disagree with the new features, I HAVE to call you out about the misleading title. “Twitter Will Block Your Retweets” IS NOT the same as “Twitter will let people block your retweets”. Fancy that! Someone doesn’t want to listen to you when you spam them with shit that YOU think is important. How rude of them! Bad Twitter!
Perhaps you could consider toning up the quality of that which you RT, being more selective, then things like this wouldn’t bother you nearly as much, eh? Your reputation is, at least in part, built on the quality of stuff you RT.
The biggest error in Twitter’s new Re-tweet (RT) method is in “social proof.” People RT trusted sources and it allows for quicker building of networks via reputable sources. I think some of the biggest originators of creative content or thought provoking work “personal branders” will be negatively impacted by this. They won’t get as much credit as they used to for their original content due to less Re-Tweets.
People can find the source of re-tweeted information under the new methodology but they’ll have to dig for that information. Before it stood out in the message whereas now it will be a footnote. As much as I hate the 140 character limit I have no problem giving up to 20 characters to give someone credit for excellent,relevant or newsworthy content.
We’ll see how it works out but I think the folks at Twitter have MUCH bigger problems to focus on now vs. this kind of shake-up to their community. How about addressing the spam problems, hackers on the network (malware links) & network growth problems (I still see the failwhale)? Oh, and I would be negligent if I didn’t remind everyone that Twitter was crippled vs. Google & Facebook on the DDOS (distributed denial of service) issue two weeks ago). I am just FLOORED that they would fundamentally “attack” the community and how it has evolved vs. addressing the above mentioned issues first. They have “bigger fish to fry” right now :)
I plan on continuing the RT @ methodology :) I know others, such as Dan Zarrella, a Re-Tweet authority, are planning on doing this as well. You can check out his recent post on this at http://danzarrella.com/mangle-retweets.html
Just my 2 cents. Delete the above link if you find it spammish but I thought the link was SPOT-ON and from a highly reputable source.
Dan Ross
@BetterBizIdeas
Hi, interesting article!
I think, whether we like it or not, we need (and are going to get) more fine grained control over the tweets we receive.
I’ve mulled this over before and have thought about “channels” where you can indicate the topic of your tweet which allows your followers to filter you better. Eg I’m interested in SEO and cats but most people are only interested in Matt’s SEO wisdom so they should be able to filter that out.
Joel
I really think retweets need to very easily marked as such, not in a light grey hard to read line at the bottom of it but something…. a symbol or diff color text even. It needs to be very clear upon the second you start reading that the message is not that of the sender.
About time! It is a pain in the butt to type it all out and find all of your re-tweeters! Will be nice to have it more readily available.