

Mob Rule: How Users Took Over Twitter - kakooljay
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_twitter/

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middus
_It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with
… Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist”
named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was
about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That
night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter
convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets.
A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one
user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates
it.”_

When reading articles like this I always get the impression that what Twitter
users like most is to tweet about Twitter. It's all meta and self-referential.

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diego
Only two percent of all tweets contain the word Twitter. The trend is actually
going down if you can see the six-month view.

<http://trendistic.com/twitter>

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hegemonicon
Add in the word 'tweet' and 'retweet' and you're sitting at around 3% of all
tweets (give or take). For reference, this is about 5-10 times higher than any
other common term I checked (facebook, google, internet, car, obama, etc.) For
futher reference, the words 'work' and 'new' both come in around the same
amount (3-4%)

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diego
Yes, but look at how the word "tweet" is used. Calling it self-referential is
a bit of a stretch, it just means "message" within twitter.

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philfreo
Better, it's like saying "FWD" in email. It's just meta-data.

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j_b_f
So basically they Wired is just writing about user-driven feature requests and
spinning it into a "mob rule" meme? I'm not sure if that's what the article is
about because I couldn't read past the capitalized "Retweet Incident" without
cringing.

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brown9-2
Well this is basically what Wired does with most of their articles - take a
fairly normal and standard thing that exists in just about every medium and
find a way to make it sounds like A Really Big Event in the headline.

