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People use the Retweet feature for only a few reasons. If you’re RT’ing something, it’s because you want to share this nugget of information with your followers. If you see a RT, it’s nice to have the source of the information so that you can follow a new and possibly interesting user. However, the RT tag already accomplished the above without a problem.
Here are a few complaints I’ve seen about the new feature:
- No ability to add your own comment. This is critical, people love to be able to insert their own opinion on something they’re sharing, and it’s important because by RTing it, you are likely feeling one of several emotions about it: You like it/support it, you hate it/are critical of it, you think it’s interesting or funny, etc., etc. Without the ability to make known your own thoughts on this tweet that you’re RT’ing, people will certainly be confused as to why you’re sharing it.
- Who cares how many people have RT’ed this very tweet? This statistic attached to every tweet is useless except for internet celebrities. Twitter is also encouraging a sort of “mob mind-set” by showing people how popular this particular tweet already is. And I’m all for individualism and independent thought!
- Why fix if it ain’t broke? As mentioned previously, the RT tag accomplished what people wanted it to accomplish. This has only made it more complicated for users. The only novel part of this feature is that it brings in the RT’ed user’s icon into your twitterstream, but how does this increase the utility of Twitter for the user? This brings me to my next point:
- The separate “Retweets” section also seems quite useless.
- You have “Retweets by others” which is once again screaming how much Twitter has groveled to the wishes of internet celebs.
- “Retweets by you” which, I suppose, is a means of separating your unoriginal tweets from your original tweets. But WHY? There is no point to this distinction.
- Lastly, “Your tweets, retweeted.” What a mouthful. I guess this in particular is a good narcissistic ego-boosting list for you to keep track of how awesome you are. But wait, didn’t the ability to track Mentions of you already do that?
So I’m very unimpressed by this. I might hate it less if there’s integration through the API, but that doesn’t really change my experience whatsoever. Bottom line: I don’t see how this feature really provides any additional utility for the average user.
Here’s another interesting tidbit, apparently 65% of all tweets still come from the web. I’m very surprised by this. Wonder how much of it is spam? I’d also be interested in seeing how much people start to use this RT feature over the normal RT tag.
