Tweet of mouth

Twitter is rolling out a new retweet functionality to a select group of - probably random - users, including yours truly. Instead of retweeting someone’s original tweet by inserting “RT” and the username of the original author before it, you click a designated retweet button. Your followers then get to see the original tweet in their twitter stream, with the user icon of the original author.

I think that Twitter is overlooking one crucial aspect of social media here. Whenever I retweet something, it means that I want to tell my followers about something interesting I’ve seen elsewhere. The person who retweets puts the original message in a certain context, and lends it credibility. They can do that explicitly, by adding a few words of their own, or implicitly, just because you know who they are and what kind of stuff they’re interested in. It’s sort of like word of mouth. When a friend tells you about something he heard from someone else, you can put in into context because you know what kind of a person your friend is.

Now however, tweets from random strangers show up in my timeline, and I have to look at the small print below to see who retweeted them. And even then I have no idea why, because the retweeter can’t add their own comments. In the analog world that would be the equivalent of a total stranger randomly starting to tell you a story, instead of a friend telling you the story they heard from that person and why they thought it was interesting. What’s more: the retweets seem to show up on the Twitter website, and not in my desktop client (Tweetie).

The thing about Twitter seems to be that it’s so brilliantly simple that you can’t seem to add anything new to it without making it worse. I’m curious to see where this is going, but for now I can only conclude: RT #fail.