A Few Downsides Of The New Twitter’s “Retweet” Feature

A few days ago Twitter founder Evan Williams wrote a very interesting and insightful post about the new “retweet” feature that is going to be deployed for every twitter user in the next days.

I read that post carefully and while every point made by Ev makes a lot of sense, as a powerful Twitter user myself I find that there are a couple of reasons why I think the old way to retweet will still be used a lot.

Ev says:

In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath

Basically, you will not see the avatar of the user who retweeted it, but the original tweet only, even if you are not following the tweet’s author. This makes sense, but he also says:

we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow

Is this good? No, in my opinion this is not good for a very good reason: you are more likely to miss that tweet.

Many times I find interesting news/tweets through the retweet activity of one or more of the users I’m following. But it’s likely not the first “copy” of that news retweeted by the users I follow. What if it got retweeted by another user who did it hours before, maybe in another timezone and while I was sleeping? I would miss it. And I would never come across that tweet/news again.

Another point:

there’s no way to annotate or leave your own comment when you retweet something with the new system.

In a nutshell, you cannot add your comments to that tweet. Sometimes it is very useful since you can add your opinion and also you can state if you agree or disagree with the news/tweet you are retweeting. This capability gets lost with the new feature, but Ev reassures users that they have something in mind in order to solve this problem.

Last but not least, seeing who retweets interesting content is very useful in order to add that users to my favorite list or recommend it, but the fact I will not see the avatar of the user who retweets prevents me from doing that. I will have less elements to figure out what users are sharing lots of interesting content and put them in my “fav” list.

I hope most third party Twitter clients will not remove the “traditional” retweet option maybe renaming it “Quote“. This way, I will be able to retweet the new way but also will always have the ability to “quote” and eventually comment other users’ tweets. What do you think?

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Tagged as: Evan Williams