One of the pillars of Social Tools is discovery. You have built a network of like-minded (or influential) people around you, you start striking conversations with them and you start getting the feel of belonging.
But of course, your network is 10 times bigger and more interesting, because of the second and third levels of people’s connections.
“Like” is one of the killer features of FriendFeed. It allowed me to discover new people’s content and I made really close connections to dozens of them. Facebook eventually copied the functionality, even though is not as useful in context as FriendFeed’s.
Since the beginning of Twitter, people found a way to hack the system, by introducing the ‘@’ sign to address users and putting ‘RT’ in front to give attribution of an interesting piece of content.
It took a while, but Twitter has finally given us a way to standardize the process and support it from within its data model. And it’s still called the same: Retweet.
According to this post by Evan Williams (Twitter’s co-founder), Twitter’s Retweet function will have several benefits:
- It will solve the noise problem: A lot of times, Twitter feels like the echo chamber from hell. Just yesterday I tweeted “Can you guys stop RT’ing items that are broadcast by users followed by more than 100k users? It’s a very slim chance we didn’t read it”. Now with the Retweet function, you will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.
- Attribution: If you put out a good tweet and it’s Retweeted, you are exposed to dozens or even thousands of people with your own profile and avatar information, which will allow potential users to follow you with one click.
- Tracking: There’s a lot of information inherent in retweeting that Twitter and other organizations can leverage in terms of data mining; like discovering really useful content (which echoes my last post about the death of PageRank) and useful content producers (which could become influentials and put on lists and so forth)
This is what a Retweet looks like in my Twitter homepage:
I don’t know @debbieweil, but I immediately see that @shashib, who I know, retweeted her. At this point I can subscribe to her or see her feed or start a conversation with her. It’s a very powerful feature.
Remember what I said about the data mining? One immediate effect is the new Retweet link (that will appear beneath your Favorites link). It has three tabs and allows you to see your Retweets, your Tweets that have been Retweeted and what your friends are Retweeting. This last one is a great way to find great emerging content.
Some people are complaining about the fact that you can’t modify or edit the Retweet, or put context around it. I think in some cases this is a valid shortcoming, and Evan comments about it:
What about those cases where you really want to add a comment when RTing something? Keep in mind, there’s nothing stopping you from simply quoting another tweet if that’s what you want to do. Also, old-school retweets are still allowed, as well. We had to prioritize some use cases over others in this release. But just as Twitter didn’t have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.
Evan also says that they will be evaluating how people use it and potentially change it based on users feedback.
The other thing he mentions is that all Twitter clients (Seesmic, Tweetdeck) are actively working on implementing this on their clients. Keep in mind that this is a feature that hasn’t been released yet to the general public. I’m sure we’ll all have it very soon.
I think that Twitter is moving (along with their other killer feature, Lists) in the right direction and that it’s simpleness will keep attracting users to the service. I for one am a born-again Twitterer.
Here’s a great post that talks more about this new functionality.
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