Could Twitters New Retweet Feature Make Twitter Less Valuable?
Shut up!
Having read Evan Williams description of how and why the new retweet function of Twitter works I find myself torn between liking the idea and downright hating it.
My issue lies with the idea of redundancy as described by Evan:
And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.
It might sound like a wonderful thing that I will not be inundated by 20 rewteets of someone claiming to see Elvis alive at a Taco stand in Guatemala but in many ways this is the key to what makes Twitter great.
We pay attention to things because we see them multiple times.
If one of my Twitter buddies retweets something awesome I might miss it because I spend most of my Twitter life in Seesmic, so tweets are constantly scrolling by even if the application is in the background (just like it is as I’m writing this post).
As Twitter will now only show you the first instance of your friends retweeting something, I will have missed the fact that Aliens have landed on the North Pole and are systematically slaughtering polar bears and Eskimos alike. It won’t matter if all 600+ of the other people I’m following retweet it, I won’t get to see it because it scrolled by while I was still wiping my backside in the bathroom.
Most of the value in Twitter is wrapped up in the ability to see the latest news and what’s going viral because all of your friends are talking about it or retweeting it. The more of your friends retweet something the more likely you are to pay attention to it. The more likely there is to be conversation about it.
That value is about to severely curtailed because most tweets that would other wise be retweets many hundreds or thousands of times won’t even be noticed because they scrolled by once.
That is going to have a major effect on traffic for everybody.
Could Twitters New Retweet Feature Make Twitter Less Valuable? | Paul O'Flaherty http://scrw.us/2fz