Social Software
Retweeting - whats the point?
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- Category: Collaboration
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- Written by angusf
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Not everyone retweets
I guess it might need to be said, but retweeting isn't yet a twitter sanctioned behaviour. Theres a new retweeting API coming, but its not universally praised. Retweeting is a phenomena that has grown up out of twitter popular use, and some conventions for hot to retweet have been established especially by client software like tweetdeck and tweetie. The conventions of
RT @username twitter messageor
twitter message (via @username)are not universal and lead to degradation of message fidelity as more metadata is included inside the message. (This is both a fundamental flaw and yet also a fundamentally simple strength of twitter today).
Are retweets just spam?
Well no, - although there are those who think they are of little value. Retweets are, normally, physically sent to followers in response to being sent to a person. This isnt spam because its not unsolicited - if you are a follower you implicitly give your permission to someone to communicate with you.
But retweets do have some SPAM like characteristics. They can be irritating. They can be repetitive. They can 'clutter' your twitter message timeline much like SPAM clutters an email inbox. Like SPAM they can contain links which, because of the side effect of the 140 character limit in twitter and the resultant use of URL shorteners, means that theres no certainty about the destination of a link and the opportunity for phishing links is quite high.
Another key difference is the social side of retweeting. Often people, myself included, retweet things because they feel they might be of interest to the follower community. But there is a fine line between this and just clogging up the timeline with attention seeking tweets which are just designed to get people to follow.
Why people retweet
Microsoft Research provide an interesting collation of reasons why people retweet in a soon to be published paper on the topic (www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf):-
- To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
- To etertain or inform or as an act of curation
- To comment on someones tweet
- To make ones presence as a listener visible
- To publically agree with someone
- To publically disagree with someone
- To validate others thoughts
- As an act of friendship, loyalty or homage
- To recognise less popular people or less visible content
- For self gain
- To save on your own timeline for the future
Personally I most often retweet to add a comment. I do this by adding brackets and my initials, as has become yet another convention to pack tweets with metadata). For example
RT @username Original tweet (My new commentary ^NN)This way I hope to be adding some small amount of value to the original tweet. Otherwise I use retweeting quite sparingly. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Certainly theres something quite refreshing about finding real people on twitter who just post about 'what they are doing now' rather than links to dubious content on the Internet. I wonder how twitter will eventually address the fact that having lots of followers actually devalues your importance to each individual you are in touch with. I've started unfollowing the big volume link tweeters - because of the clutter. To me, theres more value in people who tweet relevant interesting things. I can tune into a hashtag for an event without following all the people.
Less is more, someone said. I agree