Twitter’s New Retweet
My initial reaction to the announcement that Twitter was going to implement the retweet (RT) microsyntax as a basic function of the platform was shock (see Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes Infrastructure). Retweets are created in a variety of ways — most importantly in a vague and imprecise way, with comments added — that I thought that nearly any attempt to pin the semantics of retweeting down would fail.
I am among the folks fooling with the new implementation of RT, and it works as advertised. Which means that I don’t think it adds much to the user experience. And it specifically does not allow me to add a comment to a tweet that I am retweeting, which is bad. Clicking the retweet never leads to a text experience with anything editable, so the richness of the RT experience is being drastically curtailed.
I guess there is some performance rationale for implementing RTs this way, since the initial tweet can’t be altered, and 100 retweets to the same initial tweet don’t create a hundred copies, but just a hundred pointers. This may be an implementation that is inherently better for tracking references, for example, but is also inherently worse with regard to communication between people.
I would like to see Twitter implement the RE microsyntax (see A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE), as part of the RT overhaul. A RE — as implemented currently in Tweetdeck — is like a RT, but doesn’t copy the text of the message. Instead, it has a pointer to the original message (in Tweetdeck this is encoded as a short URL), and then the remaining characters are available for making a comment:
RE http://bit.ly/892d6 I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time
Of course, within Twitter, the URL would not have to be exposed and could be part of an internal implementation. But the idea of a RE could be paired with the new retweet as a second tweet, associated with the retweeted message, and then displayed as a pair, like this:
gregarious I really like when the clocks change
about 2 hours ago from Twitter
Retweeted by you
stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time
Perhaps more interesting would be if a number of other folks retweeted @gregarious’ post as well:
gregarious I really like when the clocks change
about 2 hours ago from Twitter
Retweeted by 3
stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time
themaria: he sleeps all day anyway
brianthatcher: I never come out in the light of day
I don’t hold out much hope that Twitter will be stop, and to take ideas like these and incorporate into the current plans for retweet. They have gone a long way down a cul de sac, I fear, that will in the long run decrease the richness of our interactions on Twitter. Perhaps the howling from the user community when this is rolled out will get them to reconsider it.
My prediction is that people will revert to manually copying and pasting messages when they want to do something more than just a blind retweet. So we will have two contending sorts of RTs — classic RT v new RT — until the Twitter folks get around to implementing something like RE.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
