Twitter Accidentally Installs Facebook’s Like Feature Instead of Retweets
We’ve all been there. It’s Christmas day and a relative has told you they got the present you’ve been craving. You rip the paper with your teeth only instead of the latest video game, Bonestorm, you find a copy of Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge. Everybody’s watching so you smile awkwardly and say how it’s exactly what you wanted. Worst thing is they think they got it right…
I’ve just finished reading Evan Williams post on “Why Retweet works the way it does” and felt the need to get some ideas down on why I disagree with some points. You should read it – it’s worth it, and a great outliner of Twitter’s reasoning.
(As a disclaimer, I don’t yet have the retweet functionality turned on on my account, but being a Social Media Douchebag, I’ve read countless blogs and tweets about the service. Hell, I’ve watched a video. Of a new feature. On a microblogging site. And now I’m writing about that feature at 3 AM. Someone shoot me now.)
On topic though, and as hinted at by this posts heading, I have some reservations regarding Twitter’s native implementation of the Retweet. I’m going to focus on two main points from Evan’s post.
Redundant redundancy
“Redundancy. If five people you follow retweet the same thing, you get five copies, which can be useful but is a lot of noise. This comes up even more in search. Popular users can get retweeted enough to saturate a search query … because they’re [now] trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.” - Evan Williams
I understand Evan’s point on this. I also understand that Twitter, and certainly search results, can become cluttered when there is a popular message that is being retweeted. Yes, it can be a pain, and yes it’s annoyed me at times.
However, what this solution does is take away one of the benefits from retweets. People new to Twitter often ask me how I follow so many people. The answer is I don’t. I don’t read everything, and I’m happy to tell people to let Twitter wash past you – if you miss something it doesn’t matter, because if it’s important you’ll likely see it later.
The problem is that the way you’ll often see something of import that scrolls by too quickly is by retweets. Many times when I catch news, links or just an funny message it won’t be because I saw the original message, or the first retweet, but rather the second, third or twentieth. Each increases the chance of that tweet reaching more people.
Does this sometimes lead to increasing the noise in the signal/noise ratio? Sure, sometimes, but I think if you’re following people who benefit your experience the good will outweigh the bad. I know that, as it stands, I’m more likely to miss messages I would like to see if people adopt the official retweet function over the current RT/Via/Hat Tip system.
Attribution smattribution
“The attribution problem: In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath.” - Evan Williams
Much as with the redundancy, the new system, which will have retweeted messages appear like regular tweets in your timeline with the retweet info below in the metadata along with “posted at” and “in reply to”, ignores one of the benefits of the retweet, which is discovering new people.
If I see one of the people I follow who I like and trust retweet someone in the old “RT @ExampleGuy” style, there’s a high chance that, if I like what I see, I’ll click through and check out the person’s profile and possibly follow them.
I think that, as it currently stands and unless apps make it very clear through colour coding etc, that we’re more likely to miss, unless we look much more closely than before, how a message appeared in our timelines. This means we’re less likely to pick up on that tweet as a ‘gateway’ to other users, rather accept it as something that belongs naturally in our timelines. Evan discusses that having the profile pic of the user who is retweeting is irrelevant to the message, but I disagree – due to the fact I’m guaranteed to be following the retweeter this is an endorsement of the message, meaning I’m much more likely to read it.
This now strays into personal branding. I often advise people that, if they want to engage on Twitter, to have a noticeable avatar and change it as little as possible – the avatar of someone I don’t follow will not likely set off any recognition in my mind, certainly not enough for me to peer closely at the metadata.
What does this mean?
The long and the short of this is that Twitter have NOT added Retweet functionality – they’ve added a microcommenting system akin to Facebook’s ‘Like’ option.
At the Social Media Club Sydney before last Russ Weakley (@russmaxdesign) spoke about integrating microcomments into the redesign of the Australian Museum’s site. One of the best comments of the night, which I hope people took away, was Russ’ discussion on levels of commitment – those who won’t write a comment will participate in a microcomment which will often lead to deeper interaction.
That is to say, I like microcomments. I think they’re neato. I think they’re just swell. What I don’t think they are are retweets. Sure, it’s a nice addition to look at a tweet you wrote and see all the people who liked that update, and I’m sure many people will use the new function more than they would normally retweet due to the lower commitment and the fact that retweets won’t double up. Hell, I’ll be much more likely to throw my two cents in, knowing that it won’t clog up my follower’s timelines with blue Batman logos.
While this is all good, it does however ignore, as I covered above, the functionality which retweets currently serve. If you follow me you’ll know I most often use the “(Via @Example Guy)” structure, and often rewrite/add to the message before the link or important info – this removes the redundancy issue, while still achieving the things I like about retweets.
Microcomments work on Facebook as it’s a site one explores. Facebook remains an active, destination type experience while Twitter has become a more passive, companion type service that many people have always open through an app. People don’t dig back through their Twitter stream, meaning endorsements of a message Twitter has determined you must have already seen are redundant.
I have two final points:
1) There is lots of things I like about he way Twitter are integrating retweets – making them trackable and finding a way around the quickly expanding tweets is a great idea.
2) I’m not worried – all the current retweet structure, like the @ replies before it, came from the community deciding on standards and solving issues without Twitter’s help. If people don’t like this, I’m sure the users will come up with the solution.
In short (and I realise the foolishness of writing that at the end of what is now a two page blog post) I think it’s great that Twitter is constantly looking to upgrade it’s service – the addition of Lists, Connections and now retweets show a great commitment to improving the experience. I just think that, like when we’re handed a brightly coloured package from an elderly relative who really tried their best, we need to prepare ourselves for the fact – the ball is in the parking lot.
[...] Warlach’s World » Blog Archive » Twitter Accidentally Installs Facebook’s Like Feature Instead… http://www.warlach.com/2009/11/11/twitter-accidentally-installs-facebook%E2%80%99s-like-feature-instead-of-retweets – view page – cached Twitter Accidentally Installs Facebook’s Like Feature Instead of Retweets [...]
Yes, but the new change is starting to put down the support for a “Important to you” or something or other column, much like Trending Topics (which only very rarely are useful to me, like when they same OMFG WHY IS GMAIL DOWN) (am I the only one who finds it annoying when something like… oh… an Apple Event has “Apple, Rock and Roll, It’s only Rock and Roll, Apple Event, iPod, iPhone, AT&T, and Apple Announcement” as trending topics, Twitter needs to figure out which Trending topics are related, group them up, to allow for more trending topics, also, they should figure out when trending topics were generated by massively popular accounts, and disallow those or something)
Ok, sorry, uh, rant over… but yes, it puts the support for “Important to You” tabs, which rates importance on number of retweets, and… dare I say it? Votes
While it can take a minute to kick in, Twitter does bundle hashtags and terms in it’s Trending topics. How they’ll keep up with that with the recent announcement that Trends will soon be geo-specific we’ll just have to wait and see.
I understand it could create an important to you column, and that would be a cool feature - i just don’t think it replaced the current benefits of retweets.
I’ve seen an increase of people talking about the Retweet options and how they get known, one idea I particularly like is dropping the RT and using something like (via @martinpiraino) as the original contributor of the message, attribution can and does get lost in the mix at times, and I’ve dropped names in some of my RT messages prior to the actual text of the message but keeping the name closest to the text and that is who it is attributable to in my book.
Part of a retweet too if it’s a shortened link to a site, is the persons response to it they send along like “I found this to be interesting…” which is why they want to share it in the first place. Or they may have some other relevant comment or feelings about it they share with their followers.
I follow a diverse group of just over 2000 people and have over 1800 people follow me, and rarely if ever get the same RT from any of them, I have gotten a RT back as a mention when someone RT’s my message and includes my @martinpiraino twitter user name in their message.
Warlach, I think your analysis of the API-supported RT as a Facebook-like “like” function is spot on. I suspect I won’t be using it, but will instead “manually” retweet stuff I think is interesting. I can think of at least four reasons for this.
1. If I RT, which is verbatim, I usually add my own comment in [square brackets] to explain why I RTed, to give my reaction, or to reply to the sender. Quite often I RT things I disagree with, and bundle it up so it’s all in context for my followers. A one-bit “me to” RT has no nuance.
2. Quite often I’ll re-word the tweet entirely. Sometimes that’s just to save space. Other times it’s because I want to tweet the link, but for reasons different from the original tweeter, or to provide wording that’ll be more of enticement to click through. I’ll use the “HT @tweeter” syntax for that.
3. Clicking “RT” without adding value is, IMHO, sodding lazy.
4. If the API-supported version only highlights the original sender, doesn’t that reduce the emphasis on me being the one passing it on to my followers? That’s not an ego thing, but if someone’s following me and I RT, then maybe it’s useful for pple to know I chose to RT it ‘cos it’s my “editorial judgement” they’re looking for. Fools them.
5. See, I knew there’d be at least 4! I agree with the thing about the river flowing on. Quite often I only see a RT after a couple people have touched it.
Enough?
They gave me retweet and took it away again, not sure how that relates to your xmas present analogy, but I was happy see it while it lasted, and hoping it’d return until i read this.
Twitter appears to have missed the fact that people use the service in different ways. The organic RT “system” is well-understood and WORKS! Why “fix” something that isn’t broken? Yeah, sure, repeated RT’s can be annoying. More often than not though the RT includes a comment - something that both followers and the original writer see.
Some people use Twitter as a broadcast service and the new retweet function should suit them well. For those of us who use Twitter as a relationship building/networking/discussion tool, turning RT’s into pseudo news headlines simply makes Twitter less usable.
I rarely see the exact same RT. The same destination URL, sure, but everyone has their own opinion and the current system allows that to be easily shared.
When I see people I respect RT’ing a person several times I check that person’s bio and site and often end up following them directly. Interaction follows and a new relationship is born. Without their avatar and without knowing anything about the reason for the RT this is unlikely to happen.
The other issue I have is that I fail to see how the new RT functionality takes into account the differing time zones. Many of the people I am closest to live well outside my own timezone. Burying their RT’s will make it that much harder to see information that is important to me.
If Twitter decides that because I am in a certain geo location then I will only see what is trending in my area it also becomes less useful as a networking tool.
Identi.ca is starting to look appealing again
Retweeting as it’s typically used involves attribution and annotation. Twitter’s implementation fails on both counts.
@Elpie: I imagine that the new Twitter RT is more useful for them because it means people are more likely to RT from their web interface than 3rd-party clients — handy for when they start placing advertising there — and to make it easier to collect statistics.
I’ve had the feature for a few minutes now, and I agree with all the point I made in my previous comment. I will not be using this feature in it current form. That said, maybe others will find a use for it.
There should be a “Like” button on this post, no?
Or a “lick” button.
In fact, definitely “lick”.