Twitter has had retweeting since it began. Sure it’s only been formalized over the last year. Lots of the clients didn’t incorporate retweet(RT) behavior selections until recently. But soon that may all be for naught.
Twitter staff are hard at work designing in retweet functionality. That’s right. The age of RT @name may soon be replaced by a little symbol and the Twitter user name doing the retweet.
Here’s what they have to say about why:
Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.
But what will it look like?
hand sketch of what Twitter retweet might look like
The short explanation:
Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You’d see @ev’s tweet even though you don’t follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (The star, reply, and retweet options only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don’t see them all the time.) Also, if you find my retweets annoying, then you’ll be able to turn them off.
Seems like a long overdue feature based on current usage of the retweet. Lots of folks are going to love this, especially the folks writing clients. No more copy/paste/prefix etc.
Pros
- Easy to understand
- Easy to use
- Provides visibility to who originally tweeted and who is retweeting
- Preserves the chain of original person tweeting and follow on retweeters
Cons
- Easy to use – what I envision is folks that would have thought twice about retweeting something will no only have to click a button and go. No complexity = easy spamming.
- Loss of visibility to who is retweeting. This sounds contradictory to the visibility pro listed above but it’s something different. As it stands now, you’d see a retweet as a tweet by me for example and then the retweeted text. In the future state, my name would appear in small text and though visible would be easy to ignore.
- Customization might decrease. Currently each client can choose their own way to handle inserting retweets. With the API option, it seems likely that client creators may opt to use the built in functionality instead of something creative.
Either way, I welcome it as something new and hopefully something that brings more folks in that were put off by the whole concept of a retweet. No more confusion about who posted the original is a big plus for folks protective of their Twitter stream.
Cheers @ev and @biz.
BTW, I’m @tojosan on Twitter.
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Tags: api, client, retweet, social network, Social Networking, tool, Twitter
