I would like to speculate a bit about why Twitter has chosen to architect the new “Retweet feature” without the ability to edit, and why they chose to call it Retweet even though it does not serve the same function as the cultural convention that we currently call Retweet.
Retweet as a Cultural Convention
Retweet, as a cultural convention has been a significant driver to Twitter adoption and even more so in creating Twitter evangelists. Many of the most diehard Twitter users frequently use Retweet. In doing so they not only distribute others content but connect to their followers. They add value through edits that add content, context, Humor etc. Often this added information is appreciated and conversational. In turn, the retweeter gains visability and credibility as a curator of good content and fosters conversations about the content. I suspect some of the most diehard Twitter users would revolt if they were confined to the new Retweet feature, wherein edits are not possible.
Motivations to Retweet
Danah Boyd @zephoria, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan are Microsoft researchers who have done extensive research on the significance of the Retweet and will soon publish a paper on the Conversational Aspects of Retweet. As part of their analysis, a series of questions were posted via @Zephoria’s account to her 12000 followers, the responses reveal the following motivations for retweeting (and I quote):
- To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences (e.g.,@rootwork: RT sees value and amplifies it and@lazygal: that which I think the majority of my“followers” haven’t seen already)
- To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation (e.g., @jmccyoung: to inform or amuse the handful of people who follow me)
- To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation(e.g., @anitsirk: to start a conversation about the content of the tweet)• To make one’s presence as a listener visible (e.g.,@doctorlaura: it shows that one is not just talking, but also listening)
- To publicly agree with someone (e.g., @rzouain: retweets are the ‘me too’ 2.0)
- To validate others’ thoughts (e.g., @amandapey: because sometimes, someone else just says it better)
- As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
- To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content (e.g., @laurelhart: to support under-recognized people or topics)
- For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants (e.g., @gravity7: to increase own followers, as a favor, possibly for thereturn favor (from influencer))
- To save tweets for future personal access (e.g., @peteaven: so I can find the tweet later by searching on myself, checking my updates)
While some value retweeting, others lament users’ selfish motivations (e.g., @earth2marsh: at best retweets altruistically propogate interesting info with credit to originator. At worst it’s pandering for social capital” and @argonaut: educated gossiping meets karma whoring). In doing so, they acknowledge that retweeting can be both a productive communicative tool and a selfish act of attention seekers.
In this last paragraph, the last sentence is critically is important; Retweeting, as it is used today, may be simultaneously selfish and beneficial to the communty! So wouldn’t it be up to the community to self police the use of Retweet? There is a simple method of doing so called unfollow. The question is how the new Retweet feature will effect the motivations to Retweet. In many cases, the inability to edit or add info to a Retweet would have a negative effect on the motivation to do so. Therefor we could expect to see less distribution of information to the long tail of twitter users. But surprisingly Twitter still chose to design it this way.
Retweet is not Retweet
The new Retweet feature is not what Retweet, as a cultural convention, has evolved to be. The inability to edit and see the chain of discovery makes the new Retweet feature something different and should be called something else; a “Relay” maybe. It should sit side by side with the old ReTweet convention and not try to replace it, nor fight for mindshare; this just adds confusion where non needs to be.
Could this be about Bringing Value to Search Partners?
So, if this causes confusion why would Twitter do it?
Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, posted ” Why Retweet works the way it does” to his blog. In this post he explains some of the reasons for the decisions behind the design of the new Retweet feature. Almost the first thing Evan says is “I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial”. This set the tone of the post as one defending the decisions that Twitter made. Many of the reasons are certainly valid, but the tone of “we know what is best” was disturbing. I was particularly taken back by “Also, old-school retweets are still allowed” Allowed?
Twitter knew that this would be controversial and must have strong business reasons for designing this feature this way and calling it Retweet especially when their it could have simply been called Relay. It is the naming of the feature “Retweet” that has caused all the contoversy.
I would venture to guess that this has something to do with Google and Bing search deal, for surely this new feature adds considerable value to search by providing metadata, and Twitter likely wants to convert as many people as possible to using the new Retweet feature so they can deliver more value to their search partners. Thus by calling the new Twitter feature “Retweet” they attempt to gain mindshare over the old cultural convention the community calls “Retweet” in hopes that the latter will fall into disuse.
It would have been so simple to call the new feature “Relay” or “Quoted Tweet” or something else and avoid this whole mess.
I hope someone can correct me and tell me I am dead wrong, but to me it seems all too obvious.
Leave a comment and tweet me @andrewmueller and let me what you think about this.
Some other good reading about retweet:
Twitter Plans to Mangle ReTweets #SaveReTweets, by Dan Zarrella @danzarrella
Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet, by MG Siegler @parislemon
Twitterloo! How to send Twitter on a hasty RT Dennis van Staalduinen @DenVan
That’s a very interesting perspective I hadn’t considered. It certainly seems that the RT implementation is a huge improvement for search term legibility, especially in third-party search engines so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that was a motivating factor.
I still believe that it will improve legibility in my own stream as well, but whether Twitter will be able to convince the community of that is another story.
John,
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. At first I took a look and disliked the new feature because it does not allow edits and imo serves a somewhat limited function compared to what I know as Retweet.
Then I saw that it could be very useful, had valid benefits and started to like it, but it bothered me that Twitter had coopted a community created term that has a cultural meaning and applied it to their feature.
When I saw Robert Scoble say they should name it something different, I knew immediately he was right and started thinking why they would not have done so.
In the end I am sure that Evan’s reasons all played a role in the decision, but I just think there is more to it.
Thanks for the open mind even though I know we have some differences of opinion on this.
Andrew
The only thing that really bothers me about all this is how they try to “fix” or change something that ain’t broke. What I would like to see is a RT counted like a vote that the tweet was worthy of being shared and then using that data to bump the tweet up in the search engines. That would make sense to me. Would function a lot like Digg or social bookmarking sites. Can’t wait to see how this all plays out though. Feels like this won’t be quick.
Hey Brandon,
Yes they do position themselves as “fixing” something and in their eyes they probably are. But to the community it feels imposing “proper grammar or etiquette” upon us through technological design.
Andrew
Interesting. And yes, the tone is what I find most disturbing as well.
Not sure if you saw Evan Williams response to Alyssa Milano’s #SaveReTweets tweet speculating about the google/bing connection:
“RT @ev @Alyssa_Milano @ross Better search is definitely one goal of new RTs but not just for Bing/Google. Finding the best stuff faster all around.”
But I have yet to see a really clear explanation of specifically what this implementation will DO for search traffic. “Finding the best stuff faster” could refer to his attribution point as well (as in, if Alysso Milano can control her RT stream, we can all find Alysso Milano faster?).
Hello Dennis,
Thanks for sharing Ev’s response to Alyssa, I hadn’t seen it. What bothers me isn’t that they want to bring value to their search partners, that makes sense for the entire ecosystem, but they would coopt a community created term and seemingly try to change its meaning.
Thanks for the comment and thanks for the article that you wrote; it definitely got me thinking.
Regards,
Andrew
I agree with you wholeheartedly Andrew. The things that go on in retweeting are varied, and complex, and (a) different people retweet for different reasons, and (b) the same person may have very different reasons for retweeting different tweets.
This is yet another example of Twitter acting on its own without talking to the community.
I can tell you that I am probably one of the biggest non-robot retweeters on Twitter, and they certainly never talked to me.
The reasons which were given for what they are doing are clearly pretextual. Your speculations may or may not be dead on; I don’t know. But I am certain that the reasons which have been given publicly are not sincere.
In my opinion, the one single aspect of twitter that has separated it from its competition is the totally user-created feature of the retweeting; if Twitter screws that one up, that will be its death knell.
Hi Ray,
Glad to see you out of Twitter Jail, LOL. I think that the reasons that Evan gave on his blog are all true, but I suspect all has not been told. It just feels that their must be more because simply naming it something different would have avoided the whole mess.
I too think that if they try to impose restrictions on RT much of the value of Twitter would be lost. It is just plain fun to annote someone else’s tweet and, well, Retweet!
Thanks for taking the time to comment,
Andrew
(i’m not used to having more than 140 characters to express myself, but..) EXACTLY!!! why follow my RTs w/ my “edits or additions” when you’ll just follow the source?? It made no sense to me, and because they (twitter) let me send in my “comments” regarding RT button option into them……a couple of hundred times, I was VERY happy to see it disabled!! Now if they would #justkillBr*tn*y !!! (it’s my x-mas wish # 47)
Andrew,
As usual, your assessment is spot on. And, while I’m not as prolific of a non-robotic RT’er as @raybeckerman, I do my fair share, so am watching this process as it unfolds fairly closely.
This is clearly not a well-thought out decision on the part of Twitter and it will be interesting to see how it shakes out. In my opinion, it is the denizens of the Twitterverse who really seem to “get” the value of the RT function who are the ones most opposed. Surely, this would seem significant to the powers that be at Twitter.
Like Ray and many others, I believe that the beauty of Twitter is the way they’ve throw the platform out there and let the users explore, create, utilize and, ultimately, decide it’s many different functionalities. And so, to change something that is an integral part of the platform, at this juncture, is clearly motivated by something other than ease of use. And probably money.
That said, I do think this new “system” has merit – but, like you, I believe it should be called something else, while leaving the RT functionality as is.
As always, your friend in passionista-ness,
Shelly
Shelly,
I agree wholeheartedly that the beauty and success of twitter resides in the fact that they gave the community a raw and simple technology and let the community define use and create tools to enhance it. Unfortunately, I fear that the decision was well thought out and they still chose to do what they did.
To me this is telling of how economic influences are going to come into play and influence the future evolution of the platform. It is sad but probably necessary for survival. My discontent comes from what seems to me to be a lack of transparency regarding the intent behind the actions.
Thanks for reading and commenting, my passionista friend
Very interesting perspective. I don’t mind the new feature, but like you I agree that it doesn’t match what “Retweet” means to the community. But, should we expect any differently?
The first chapter of Twitterville discusses how Twitter was really built around how people were actually using the tool, but what I’ve seen the past six months is Twitter doing what it wants and not caring what the community wants – changing @replies; did anyone really ask for lists; RTs; etc.
Ultimately what it boils down to is they are a company with millions of users and a huge brand to protect. Unless a competing tool comes into play, which I don’t see on the horizon, they are going to keep doing things the way they want and the community will either agree to disagree or stop using the tools.
So far what I’m seeing is people grumbling but continuing to tweet.
Good thinking here, Andrew. BTW many thanks for promoting my post on the same topic.
As for the bit about “pandering for social capital”, I would say that from a Behavioral Economics perspective, that can never be fully divorced out of the equation. Nor should it be:
As I tried to make clear in my post, social capital (i.e. trust, asf.) as an ongoing unconscious calculus is very real. A little bit of it is put on the line with each tweet, and each retweet. So why would we want to take ourselves almost completely out of the equation, and lose our voice?
That’s what Social Media has been about at the core after all, everyone having a voice. Sure, there are many powerbrokers that wish this hadn’t happened, and would like nothing better than to take it back (Murdoch/Old Media, etc. etc.).
So it seems that at a deeper level, Twitter is learning (for the second time, first came the @ replies brouhaha) a lesson about a “Powerbroker vs. Friend” archetype conflict: Trying to tell us how to do something (The Powerbroker) that was established at a community (The Friend) level.
Which is why I really wondered if they of all people still don’t get social media. Or that they have built the platform(s) (same goes for Facebook) to allow the community to yell more loudly than ever before about having Twitter trying to dictate something.
Andrew,
The new Twitter retweet feature depersonalizes the retweet. If you want to connect with people on Twitter, use the older style. But if you just want something that’s quick and easy, use the new one.
I like connecting with the authors of the tweets I retweet. When I use the older more personal style of retweeting, the author sees my tweet in his or her replies / mentions tab, and is likely to respond. When I use the newer more automated Twitter retweet button, the author is much less likely to see it.
I like connecting with my readers when I send out a retweet. When I use the older more personal style of retweeting, my readers see my picture attached to the retweet and can easily see that this is something I have selected for them. When I use the newer more automated Twitter retweet button, my readers see a stranger’s picture on the retweet, and it is more difficult for them to see that it is from me.
Carl Ingalls
Spot on Carl, everything you say is 100% accurate. The native twitter retweet feature cripples the conversational and to some extent social aspects of the platform. The other main twitter feature “lists” to some extent does the same thing when you compare it to how “groups” previously functioned in Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Unfortunately Twitter is pressuring developers to replace groups with lists. I suspect they are doing the same to some extent for the RT feature.
Thanks for you comment Carl, I can count on you to bring a thoughtful voice to the conversation.
If there is one thing I actually like about the new style retweets is the way which they display a new face into my timeline which draws my attention quicker than the time it takes even to skim read the old style RT which don´t do that.
I now mix up my retweets using the old style and the new style and gradually get into the habit of checking the retweet button on twitter.com. Of course some apps have integrated the new style RT´s. Nonetheless I sense the community prefer the classic style. Only today Hootsuite launched v5 and one of the most repeated features is the ability to reset the RT in the app to the old style:
Look how popular this is:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=HootSuite+retweet
Hi Paul,
Yes the Twitter native retweet certainly may useful for certain situations and purposes. Still, I think it serves a different purpose than the original and it hurts the communications potential of the platform when it attempts to replace the more versatile original. IMO it should have be named something different.
I was very happy to see that Hootsuite now gives you a preference, I already went ahead and changed my preferences and will probably use Hootsuite more as a result. Now, if they allowed me to great groups in addition to lists, I would be ecstatic.