Category: Message & Positioning

Soldiers at attention: awright Twitter conscript, approved you’ve probably heard that Twitter has finally enabled a feature it calls “Retweet”. Well, after years of hacking together manual ReTweets – cutting and pasting, editing, shortening, and workarounds by Twitter partner applications like TweetDeck, you’d think this would be cause for great rejoicing among the weary soldiers of Twitterland…

We Beg to Differ.

What’s an RT?

For those new to Twitter (or with no patience for it), basically “RT” is a convention that arose among Twitter users as a way of sharing and amplifying content from other people that they agree with, find interesting or funny, or that adds to a discussion they’re having in some way. Here’s an extreme example of one message from last night:

Here’s a translation of the post:

• @brianlj read a blog post by Twitter CEO Evan Williams @eV, and wanted to share the link and to let others  know  he disagreed with it.
• He added the hashtag #Save ReTweet which made it part of a public discussion.
• I wanted to share his thought with my followers (I’m @DenVan). So, I copied it and pasted it, and added “RT ” at the beginning, then added a comment at the end “Ditto”.
• Then, my friend @zchamu did the same, crediting me and adding her comment “Me three!”

Think about how incredible that is. Four people’s thoughts are contained in the tiny, tiny space of just 140 Characters. That’s the power of the RT.

The revolution is ugly, but it works

Now granted, to the untrained eye, it looks a bit messy – okay really messy – so we’ve been hoping for some clean-up from the good people at Twitter for a long time. You know, a few simple tools that would respect the power and intent of the RT but would make it easier to use and scan.

But what happened instead? RT activist Dan Zarella puts it well when he says:

In a stunningly disappointing move, Twitter has threatened to completely eviscerate most of the value out of ReTweets by “formalizing” a feeble version of a format that was already well understood and functional for all users involved.

The leader on a high horse

On Tuesday, Twitter head Evan Williams wrote his first blog post since March, “Why Retweet works the way it does”, with these ominous words:

I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that’s gone into it…

Uh-oh. Bad sign. When a CEO runs to the battlements so early in a communications piece, you can just smell the restlessness in the troops – and not just in the Twitterati, but among the people working at Twitter as well.

He goes on to describe RT as cool, before listing off a number of “problems” that currently exist with the RT convention that, as he puts it, “emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information”.

The problems Evan Williams lists (in brief):

1. Attribution confusion – hard to tell who the “owner” of the originally tweeted content was.
2. Mangled and Messy – formatting makes message hard to read and author’s intent may be lost.
3. Redundancy – lots of “RePeets”.
4. Noisiness – RT @sycophant RT @wanker Blah blah blah
5. Untrackable – hard to collect RTs of a person or post in one place.

The solution from Twitter :

Let’s say that in the new Twitter RT universe, I wanted to share the incredible insight that Evan Williams actually posted last night (at right), with my followers.

• A single “Retweet” button would appear under his tweet.
• By clicking this, I would instantly create an exact verbatim copy of the original. My followers would see this exactly as @ev had written it, and what’s more, his name and avatar would appear beside them – even if my follower wasn’t following him.
• As the Retweeter, my name would appear in a small footnote on the bottom of Ev’s tweet, but not in the actual Tweet.
• Without any opportunity for editing or commentary, I couldn’t add context for my followers like “Can you believe this?” or “Me too!” or “What is this dude smoking?”.
• No “RT” or other prefix will indicate that the is a ReTweet. Only that small footnote will make it appear different from any other tweet….

Our take: the new ReTweet “feature” needs Re-bwanding

Sorry Evan.

You’re a genius, and we all owe you a tremendous debt for creating this Twitter thing, but this new feature you’ve created is not ReTweet. I’ve called it “RePeet”. Or maybe it’s “Copy” or “Clone”, or as one wag called it “Exact Tweet” (ET – and it phones home to Twitter).

Whatever it is, it’s broken.

And we’re not alone in saying so.
(this list is growing, so please send us more!)

• A great critique from TechCrunch
• The original rant from Dan Zarella
• Andrew Mueller muses on possible Google / Bing search motivators.
• Beth Kanter thinks the new feature will lead to RT bloat (but we disagree)
• RayBeckerman reflects on how he learned to stop worrying and love the RT.
• Alex Schleber on how Twitter doesn’t get the “Social” part of SM
• Lance Ulanoff from PC Magazine in disbelief
• Justine Bateman thinks new RTs are spam.
• Lisa Barone lists all the reasons to hate DUM-RT.

To the battlements! What you can do soldier:

1. Don’t use the new button! Just keep doing what you’ve always done.
2. Use the hashtag #SaveReTweets to register your displeasure.
3. Inundate @ev and @twitter with negative traffic.
4. Sign the petition Dan Zarella has put together.