Retweeting is pointless. It's completely ridiculous. You only have to fill up 140 characters, and you don't have the creativity to even come up with that. So, you fire up TweetDeck and hit the retweet button all day long. Uncreative and utterly pointless for anyone who's not a pointless social media retard.
If I see a Twitter profile and it's got nothing but retweets, I hit the magic "block" button. These people are pointless leeches, and usually have nothing of any interest to say: it's all "OMG social media is so transgressive! I love Web 2.0 so much!" etc. Pointless crap.
RTing isn't just about voting, it's about sharing. It's about saying "I think this is good" AND "I don't think you've seen it". And that's because I know that your network is different to my network and by RTing I want, for a moment, to bridge that gap.
Michael Becker
· 8 months ago
Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silly to re-tweet, especially when I usually have to spend a few minutes editing to make sure my re-tweet is going to fit into the 140-character limit. Sometimes I even catch myself writing shorter normal tweets, just so that if someone were to RT me, they wouldn't have to spend a lot of time editing.
And after all that, there's no way to keep score. Fail.
dave
· 8 months ago
It's just like voting-up something on Digg. Why should you have to write anything at all. It's a simple gesture. "I like this and think everyone I know should see it." One mouse click and move on.
nickhalstead
· 8 months ago
I agree it should be simple - so for the tweetmeme button/widget thats now on mashable, RRW, (and a shed load of others) - Very soon when you press the button it wont require you to redirect back to twitter, we will just do it for you. So it will be very much your 'like' on friendfeed.
dave
· 8 months ago
Thank you. In computer science we call this "paving the cowpaths."
nickhalstead
· 8 months ago
Your missing the point completely - its a simple KISS statement, yes they could add a field for like/tweet whatever, but that changes the simple model of why twitter is kicking friendfeeds arse and will continue to do so. For all the techie goodness that FF has it is too fecking complicated for the average user and that isnt going to changed.
jay dedman
· 8 months ago
A retweet is important information that I want ti passa long, while giving attribution to originator. So how does this "click" manifest itself? How do followers see that I like what another tweet says?
barrymcw
· 8 months ago
Isn't re-tweeting that simple? Occasionally I have to edit a tweet to re-tweet it but as often as not it's two mouse-clicks. As far as I can tell, all the main Twitter clients have a "re-tweet" button. You click it once, then click "OK" or whatever in a dialogue box. For my uses (10-15 tweets/day, fewer than 5 re-tweets/day) that's not too onerous.
Ben Atlas
· 8 months ago
This is so interesting I will have to RT it.
dave
· 8 months ago
Please do! :-)
Ben Atlas
· 8 months ago
Seriously, everything that is done in Twitter is designed to propagate your own name with every Tweet. It is more personal, it has a signature, others will notice and follow. Digg is a selfless click. Who needs that?
Pablo
· 8 months ago
Yup.
Jim Roepcke
· 8 months ago
What if Twitter included the tweets you've marked as a favorite to your stream, would that be better?
Digg's stream is different than Twitters, it's a global shared stream, whereas a Twitter user's stream is neither global or shared.
ryantate
· 8 months ago
Yes that would rock and solve the problem! As long as there is some sort of formatting explaining who favorited it. Favorites should look a touch different in the feed. (As I mentioned above before seeing your post http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/26/ret...)
Sigurdur Armannsson
· 8 months ago
It's a tought. I read recently someone saying tha retweeting without a reference to the original source or even changing the wording or editing was a theft... Don't remember who wrote this but it was some name on Twitter.
Have a nice Sunday too.
kylehase
· 8 months ago
Attribution is gives credit to the creator/finder of the content. If it fits I say add the @person but adding the names of each person through which the RT passes is stupid.
Howard Weaver
· 8 months ago
Damn. I was all set to get mad at you again, Dave, and then you went all reasonable and thoughtful on me. Aw, well, next time.
\-\/\/
Dan Bricklin
· 8 months ago
Here are my tweets about this (@DanB):
Twitter is a general purpose tool. RT is how users do "I like" & let others know name so they may follow if they like. What I like about RT is that it was invented by users. Users are making Twitter what they want it to be. It is modeling clay. [Intellectual Modeling Clay is what Jean Louis Gassee called VisiCalc -- see page 460 of my book] As I posted on your blog about 1-2-3, don't want to add too many features. Just the Goldilocks "right" amount.
(And Dave, I don't mind joining something that gets you mentioned & retweeted everywhere giving you lots of tweet-flow. I've learned a lot from you in the past and will continue in the future -- that's why I read your stuff. Keep it up!)
-DanB
LindanCourt
· 8 months ago
Hmm. Not sure I agree. A RT@ is a kind peer-endorsement, or a vote of confidence made in a public forum. I think RT are a wonderful part of Twitter culture and very distinct from Digg.
barrymcw
· 8 months ago
I don't know that I agree.
Not everyone that follows me follows the people I follow. They might follow them, if they knew about them. They might really like following them. Introducing the people I follow to my followers might be a really beneficial service.
So, when someone I follow says something interesting, something I think my followers might like as well, I can do one of two things:
1. I can say it myself, which isn't exactly plagiarism but could be seen as taking credit for their find/thought/whatever.
2. I can re-tweet it, passing along both the initial thought and a mini-recommendation of someone who, if you enjoy following me, you might like to follow as well.
Sure, I could play along with the #FollowFriday meme and share the people I follow that way, but when I re-tweet, I'm both suggesting someone to follow & providing a taste of what you might get when following. That, IMHO, seems pretty useful and more than just "popularity metadata."
Cheers
jeremey
· 8 months ago
Exactly! RT is an active pushing of something out to more people. Very different from just "liking" something. I may like a lot of things but very few am I going to intentionally pass on.
dave
· 8 months ago
Wrong! Liking has exactly that effect. All your followers see it.
It's the difference between (again computer science) pass by value or pass by reference.
I don't want to make a copy when I retweet, I just want to attach my name and send it to even more people.
gotgenes
· 8 months ago
Bingo. "Like" is what RT is supposed to be, only far less annoying because it doesn't cause redundancy in my information feed. It keeps the noise down and my signal high. I can't stand chronic re-Tweeting, but chronic "like"-ing is much more tolerable.
jeremey
· 8 months ago
The semantics of retweet are different from the semantics of like. I prefer the semantics of retweet because it is extremely clear what the side effects are. Could retweet be implemented in a programmatic way by Twitter which would separate the RT "chain" metadata from the original post? Yes. Would that be nice? Yes, I think so. But I like the organic-ness of RT, and I really like the (probably accidental) name, again because it clearly states "I am re-posting this because I want to pass it on", rather than "I like this and that may have X, Y, or Z side effects which aren't necessarily clear".
Ari Herzog
· 8 months ago
Sounds like you similarly "like" Facebook's application of "like" in their stream, which was copied from FriendFeed? Now, do you like Digg, Reddit, and their ilk?
hillary hartley
· 7 months ago
Also, if Twitter had a better method of surfacing the things we favorite then it could be a user preference to turn them off (just like @Replies). As it is, I usually just end up unfollowing people who retweet more than I like. Not an ideal solution.
Taiwan Brown
· 8 months ago
I like to give credit when credit is due!
Whats the difference between a retweet and a reblog? Can I steal this article as my own? ummm no... You want credit and maybe even a link back... just like what we do: RT @BlahBlah (credit and a link back)
@taiwanbrown
Neal Jansons
· 8 months ago
Now THIS I agree with. The retweet is definitely just voting.
imackenze
· 7 months ago
It's kinda like voting, but any implementation would need to retain the "hey famous guy that I'm parroting! please notice me!" side of it to be successful.
Jesse Luna
· 8 months ago
I'm not a bit fan of seeing nothing but retweets but in this type of large but viral ecosystem, the RT helps insightful, fun, timely, and urgent messages "bubble up" to get our attention.
hillary hartley
· 7 months ago
There's no reason Twitter couldn't build a better method for surfacing things you "like" or "favorite" so that things would bubble up exactly the same way without the messy user experience of "RT". Newbies have no idea what that is and often use it incorrectly.
Seamus Condron
· 8 months ago
I disagree with this on a couple of levels.
RT's help build your audience. On the feed I operate, @mediabistro, thousands of people have discovered us through Retweeting of our updates.
Then there is the matter attribution and good will. Retweeting is like "paying it forward." Passing credit to the person that was responsible for you discovering information should be part of the RT (or "via" which has become popular also). Since our feed is largely focused on educating the followers on what's happening in their industry, the more people that information reaches, whether through Retweets or some other method, the better.
Digging and Liking require less of an investment, at least from my perspective. I like to think Retweeting takes an extra second of thought along the lines "will this be valuable to at least a portion of my audience?"Obviously, there are scores of abusers, but in general I think the RT has an important purpose, as do Diggs and "likes."
Ari Herzog
· 8 months ago
Seamus, shouldn't the goal of MediaBistro be to send people to your website? How does a retweet do anything but send people to following your twitter account?
Seamus Condron
· 8 months ago
If our Twitter feed consisted solely of links to our website, it would be pretty useless, and a turn off. People don't want a marketing channel, they want value. We have expanded our audience by providing information people find useful. And they are grateful for that. The feed is a powerful extension of our website and has become part of our brand experience. An increasing number of people have discovered us via Twitter first.
imackenze
· 7 months ago
Seamus is right - an important facet of re-tweeting is name-dropping, spamming, and the general 'personal brand' building crap side of twitter.
Bertil
· 8 months ago
Twitter have tried to be different by over-simplifying things. Approval needed a feature, and you are right to point out that a RT offers little benefit over a comment — but it as worth a try.
Brad Shannon
· 8 months ago
I agree with what others are saying, that RTing extends useful info to a new audience. I follow people that my followers might not. It also cuts down the number of people I have to follow, because others can follow someone and RT the info that I'd be interested in. Specialization makes everything a little more efficient.
Not to mention the fact that some of the most interesting people I follow are those I found through others' RTs.
M Freitas
· 8 months ago
There's a mechanism there for this... It's called "Favorites". But it's too complicated - would be following hundreds, thousands of favorites? Couldn't Twitter create a "Favorites in your network" to provide a single feed?
Yes, but they don't get it.
ryantate
· 8 months ago
You nailed it -- favorites is key -- Twitter needs to make a tiny tweak to favorites and it would have a huge impact: just put Favorites in with the whole stream -- when you follow someone you get both their tweets and their favorites (with some kind of formatting for the favorite so it's clear who you got it via and why). Same for RSS -- default feed should have both faves and items.
You'd want to be able to turn this off person by person or all at once, of course.
(Update oh I see Jim Roepcke also said this below)
dave
· 8 months ago
That would do it. When I favorite an item it goes in my output stream.
lmorchard
· 8 months ago
Twitter favorites would be the solution to retweets, if only they'd put some more work into it.
I even went so far as to throw together this crappy utility to assemble the RSS feeds of my friends' favorites into an OPML file I subscribed to on Google Reader:
Dave: I think you're giving too much credit to "like", since it's kinda hosed. Like many folks, 1/3 of the time, I "like" something so my network will see it. But I also end up using it to keep track of things I want to return to later (as a bookmark, IOW), and occasionally as a personal pat-on-the-back to the author. In the latter instances, it would be better if the action *didn't* end up pushed out to friends and FOAFs.
You've also got to remember that your Twitter network doesn't look like everyone else's. My wife uses Twitter almost exclusively as a non-geek semi-synchronous chat room, and given Twitter's awful conversation support, RTs are the best way to push the discussion around. There's no real sense of voting... it's making sure that some funny bit of snark reaches beyond the author's own network.
And finally, a little nitpick. "Share" is Friendfeed's version of RT. "Like" is FF's version of favorites, IMO. It's Twitter's favorite functionality that's broken, not the concept of retweeting.
Louis Gray
· 8 months ago
Dave, we're on the same wavelength again. Just Friday I posted that Retweeting was lazy. Not everybody agreed, of course, but I explained why I don't retweet.
Yes, the fact that you often need re-edit a retweeted message is stupid. The simple answer though is that Twitter doesn't do retweet, it's entirely users' idea which Twitter still doesn't support. Twitter web interface does not have RT option - it's only available from 3rd party apps and scripts. Hence poor support for it.
egoldstein
· 8 months ago
Actually, a retweet is pretty much the exact same thing as a pop on clipmarks.com(pops preceeded retweets by about 2 years). When a user on clipmarks pops a clip it does EXACTLY what you say a retweet should do. This is not the case on digg or reddit...but, not surprisingly, Clipmarks gets ignored...seems to work that way.
Mike Wilson
· 8 months ago
See I never thought of it that way. I think of RTing as passing something forward to the cross section of people who are following me who likely haven't seen it.
- Digg's failure is that it allows downvoting. The result of that is that people pounce on something to bury it.
I dunno what FF or others do. There are too many of these damn things already.
Fabius
· 7 months ago
I do not think like you. I think that the retweet is a technique for sharing information but retweet be used with caution.
Joe Lazarus
· 7 months ago
Twitter offers something similar to FriendFeed "likes" through their "favorites" feature (ie. click the little star next to any post). The problem is that favorites are only visible to people who favorite, not to their followers. If there was a way to see other people's favorites, either for everyone or as an opt-in, there would be no need for retweets.
Eliot
· 7 months ago
I like this approach. Favorite = Like. But sometimes I'd like to be able to vote up but not crowd my favorites list with the item. A Favorite is something I want to keep, to return to or follow up on. That's too heavy for a "like". Perhaps there needs to be something like a "nod of approval", or "nod" for short..
As Dave said, retweeting shouldn't take any of the precious 140 characters of a tweet—I couldn't agree more. When Twitter gets out of firefighting mode and starts adding features again, this should be among the first they add.
webaddict
· 7 months ago
Interesting post Dave. It inspired me to write my own retort to your post. Hope it makes sense. :)
I'm with you on this. Like would work well. Heck, I'm not even interested in preserving tweet credit. The point is about what's shared now who shared it right? I think that certain folks want to maintain their status as great sharers. Retweeting helps do that for them.
Your alternative, liking vs retweeting, makes better sense. However, in the current Twitter model, how would we see things that others mark as liked? I'd imagine they just show up in the tweet stream as coming from the person who originally sent it, but show up in our stream even if we aren't following them.
In @bethrae's twitter following stream, the @davewiner tweet shows up as: Found this great link. see xyz.com (via @tojosan @DaveWiner)
Or some such?
Dave
· 7 months ago
When I'm using Twhirl or other third party Twitter clients the current retweet functionality works well because it shows me the tweet being retweeted. If it was 'liked' then I'd probably need to click to see the original tweet. I realize that it's just one click but why add that level of annoyance? (Not criticizing. Just talking.)
All Comments
If I see a Twitter profile and it's got nothing but retweets, I hit the magic "block" button. These people are pointless leeches, and usually have nothing of any interest to say: it's all "OMG social media is so transgressive! I love Web 2.0 so much!" etc. Pointless crap.
I wrote a post about this: http://tommorris.org/blog/2009/03/03#When:18:20:18
And after all that, there's no way to keep score. Fail.
anything at all. It's a simple gesture. "I like this and think everyone I
know should see it." One mouse click and move on.
Digg's stream is different than Twitters, it's a global shared stream, whereas a Twitter user's stream is neither global or shared.
Have a nice Sunday too.
\-\/\/
Twitter is a general purpose tool. RT is how users do "I like" & let others know name so they may follow if they like. What I like about RT is that it was invented by users. Users are making Twitter what they want it to be. It is modeling clay. [Intellectual Modeling Clay is what Jean Louis Gassee called VisiCalc -- see page 460 of my book] As I posted on your blog about 1-2-3, don't want to add too many features. Just the Goldilocks "right" amount.
(And Dave, I don't mind joining something that gets you mentioned & retweeted everywhere giving you lots of tweet-flow. I've learned a lot from you in the past and will continue in the future -- that's why I read your stuff. Keep it up!)
-DanB
Not everyone that follows me follows the people I follow. They might follow them, if they knew about them. They might really like following them. Introducing the people I follow to my followers might be a really beneficial service.
So, when someone I follow says something interesting, something I think my followers might like as well, I can do one of two things:
1. I can say it myself, which isn't exactly plagiarism but could be seen as taking credit for their find/thought/whatever.
2. I can re-tweet it, passing along both the initial thought and a mini-recommendation of someone who, if you enjoy following me, you might like to follow as well.
Sure, I could play along with the #FollowFriday meme and share the people I follow that way, but when I re-tweet, I'm both suggesting someone to follow & providing a taste of what you might get when following. That, IMHO, seems pretty useful and more than just "popularity metadata."
Cheers
It's the difference between (again computer science) pass by value or pass
by reference.
I don't want to make a copy when I retweet, I just want to attach my name
and send it to even more people.
Whats the difference between a retweet and a reblog? Can I steal this article as my own? ummm no... You want credit and maybe even a link back... just like what we do: RT @BlahBlah (credit and a link back)
@taiwanbrown
RT's help build your audience. On the feed I operate, @mediabistro, thousands of people have discovered us through Retweeting of our updates.
Then there is the matter attribution and good will. Retweeting is like "paying it forward." Passing credit to the person that was responsible for you discovering information should be part of the RT (or "via" which has become popular also). Since our feed is largely focused on educating the followers on what's happening in their industry, the more people that information reaches, whether through Retweets or some other method, the better.
Digging and Liking require less of an investment, at least from my perspective. I like to think Retweeting takes an extra second of thought along the lines "will this be valuable to at least a portion of my audience?"Obviously, there are scores of abusers, but in general I think the RT has an important purpose, as do Diggs and "likes."
Not to mention the fact that some of the most interesting people I follow are those I found through others' RTs.
Yes, but they don't get it.
You'd want to be able to turn this off person by person or all at once, of course.
(Update oh I see Jim Roepcke also said this below)
I even went so far as to throw together this crappy utility to assemble the RSS feeds of my friends' favorites into an OPML file I subscribed to on Google Reader:
http://decafbad.com/2009/01/twitter-friend-fave...
You've also got to remember that your Twitter network doesn't look like everyone else's. My wife uses Twitter almost exclusively as a non-geek semi-synchronous chat room, and given Twitter's awful conversation support, RTs are the best way to push the discussion around. There's no real sense of voting... it's making sure that some funny bit of snark reaches beyond the author's own network.
And finally, a little nitpick. "Share" is Friendfeed's version of RT. "Like" is FF's version of favorites, IMO. It's Twitter's favorite functionality that's broken, not the concept of retweeting.
You Have Entered a No Retweeting Zone, Please Proceed
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/04/you-have-...
The simple answer though is that Twitter doesn't do retweet, it's entirely users' idea which Twitter still doesn't support.
Twitter web interface does not have RT option - it's only available from 3rd party apps and scripts. Hence poor support for it.
- Digg's failure is that it allows downvoting. The result of that is that people pounce on something to bury it.
I dunno what FF or others do. There are too many of these damn things already.
As Dave said, retweeting shouldn't take any of the precious 140 characters of a tweet—I couldn't agree more. When Twitter gets out of firefighting mode and starts adding features again, this should be among the first they add.
http://openpresswire.com/twitter/retweet-is-stu...
Your alternative, liking vs retweeting, makes better sense. However, in the current Twitter model, how would we see things that others mark as liked? I'd imagine they just show up in the tweet stream as coming from the person who originally sent it, but show up in our stream even if we aren't following them.
Example:
@DaveWiner Found this great link see xyz.com
-@tojosan likes it.
@bethrae is following @tojosan but not @DaveWiner
In @bethrae's twitter following stream, the @davewiner tweet shows up as:
Found this great link. see xyz.com (via @tojosan @DaveWiner)
Or some such?
twittley.com
digg + twitter = twittley.com
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