
Why Retweet works the way it does - tortilla
http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html
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ivankirigin
There wasn't anything exclusive about doing something easy like a conventional
retweet button, and this upgrade. They should have done the former then the
latter.

The main advantage, by far, of this retweet implementation, is that twitter
controls everything. The value of the retweet data is astounding. It might
make their service viable - compared to the tyranny of chronological views of
everyone that could be their downfall.

We need to find good content, and bubble it up. You can't just have realtime
to do realtime search. You need content. Currently, twitter has an extremely
poor estimate of what is good.

Let me take this opportunity to also gripe that favorites should be MUCH more
prominent. They need to incentivize them by showing a count or usernames next
to each tweet. And let me reorder tweets based on their being marked a
favorite.

~~~
bjtitus
I agree with your statement about favorites. I think, if they promoted them,
they would be a great way to help rank content. I think this, combined with
retweets could really help bubble stuff up to the surface.

Part of the issue with retweets is that the whole network will become more
noisy and people will have to get used to that, I think this is partly a
mistake. It could be fixed by allowing users to favorite cool things and
retweet things they REALLY wanted to surface.

~~~
ivankirigin
They could make a setting to only show retweets if more than N people have
retweeted it. I'd love a similar setting for my current stream that relies on
favorites.

Come to think of it, I could make that in a few hours...

~~~
TimH
You have seen <http://favstar.fm> right? Let me know if I can make it more
useful to you. Try the 'my favstar list' feature there - it does what you're
talking about.

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joshwa
Besides the commenting thing, something I haven't seen covered elsewhere is
that I won't have any idea WHO retweeted the thing that shows up in my
timeline. The authority (and, indeed, just the personality) of the person
recommending the tweet has a lot to do with whether or not I care, or what my
expectations for a link in that retweet might be.

EDIT: looks like the screenshot in ev's post was misleading-- it does show who
retweeted:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/hate-it-or-love-it-
twit...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/hate-it-or-love-it-twitters-new-
retweet-style-rolling-out/)

~~~
steveklabnik
Isn't it supposed to add "retweeted by x (and x others)" down at the bottom by
"from web"?

I thought that's how I read that it was going to work... I don't have the
feature yet, so I can't tell you.

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joshwa
the screenshot in ev's post didn't show that, but now I see that the
screenshot on Techcrunch does. That makes me feel a bit better.

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milestinsley
I've always been skeptical of Retweeting. As the article mentions, it's
responsible for diluting the quality of your news stream. Any value-add from
the sentiment of a Retweet is offset by the sheer noise-to-signal ratio and
redundancy from repetition.

The new feature is a step forward. It seems that it formalizes the Retweet
syntax into, what is essentially, a vote for a Tweet. This is primarily what
Retweeting has come to mean anyway.

I hope this encourages more original content on Twitter.

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joshuarr
My biggest issue to the new retweet feature is that I can no longer add a
comment with my retweets. Most of the time this is a deal-breaker for me.

~~~
niyazpk
You can always retweet the old-school way. It is not deprecated.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
It can never be deprecated only banned (i.e if twitter doesn't accept tweets
with "RT" in them)

~~~
j_b_f
They are 100% not going to do that.

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tibbon
As someone data mining Twitter, I have no problems with this and it makes my
life 100x easier. Matching up RTs before and tracking them was hell.

~~~
bhousel
Not sure if it will help you much - people will still continue to RT the old
way.

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jordanbrown
I think this is great but again ill be waiting for them to allow comments in
the retweets. For now I may just be quoting instead of retweeting.

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techiferous
My twitter doesn't have this retweet functionality. I guess they haven't
launched that feature yet?

~~~
ivankirigin
They are rolling it out to some users.

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techiferous
I read that, but the blog post is dated September 21st. I guess I expected
their beta testing of the feature to last only a couple of weeks and that they
would have enabled it for everyone by now.

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tortilla
I think the date on the post is wrong. If you go to the main page, the date is
11/10.

~~~
techiferous
Ah, that makes much more sense now. Thanks!

