Snowcrashing

The New Retweets: From The EgoSystem To The DataSystem.

Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

Twitter did not invent retweets. Its users did: they created a mechanism, to allow word-of-mouth within the 140 chars world. Retweets are the vehicle for virality: you like an article, you pass it to your followers,with or without your comments, and they do the same.

Like in real-life, the original retweets followed the subject-object syntax: “I” recommend “you” read this, which was recommended by @friend1 which was recommended by @friend2, etc.

This EGO-system is very dear to all twitter users: make it a matter of vanity (me me me and my 1million followers), or of trusted sources (if Scoble says so, I gotta check it out real fast…). But it is also the only way virality works: I am telling you, and you might do what I ask you to, because it is ME saying so.

The new Retweet implementation is subverting this logic in different ways:

-Only the first person who divulges the news remains attached to the tweet, the others disappear as mere “supporters”;

-You get a retweet only once. So if 10 of my friends are deeming that same news important, I have no way to tell, or rather it is not as immediate as it was before. Rick Mans’ post on this is a recommended reading.

So why is this happening?

A few guesses:

-If users were to adopt retweets diligently, Twitter would have a much easier life in mining its database to analyze the dynamics of retweets and provide useful analytics tools to its future clients. And according to Dick Costolo at the Crunchies today, this is something that is close to being rolled out.

All the meta-data is there, on a golden plate, intact: one tweet– not 1,000s interpretations (retweets with comments), one short link. Mesh that up with the data on the “originator” of the news and the supporters/retweeters, their authoritativeness, their retweet patterns and let search engines gobble it all up in their search results. No duplicates, no weird comments, all is consistent and clear. Let advertise also jump in and mix within the stream.

“What’s happening” and Retweets go together: it’s a shift from a pure EGOSystem to a DataSystem. And, frankly, if you’re on Twitter to get the best news from the finest minds, you might end-up liking the new implementation of retweets.

But do retweets stand a chance to gain mass-market traction? There is one principle, which this particular UI implementation seems to have forgotten: trust. People are not willing to listen to someone they don’t know.  Removing the user from the twitter stream, and replacing it with the original source of that tweet seems like a move that might hinder virality in dramatic ways, across the board.

Tags: Retweets