Comments on: A better design for Twitter retweets

By: Human 2.0 Holiday Highlights | Human 2.0

Human 2.0 Holiday Highlights | Human 2.0 — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:15:57 +0000

[...] 2009, the year of Twitter (including two of our most popular posts, Twitter’s not a site, it’s a protocol and A better design for Twitter retweets). [...]

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:52:04 +0000

Twitter can’t even thread normal tweets in a meaningful way. They have a parent ID, “tweet message ID”, reply tweet message ID, user iD’s on all ends, and dates to pull it all together.

Usenet has been threading on message-id since long before http
was even an nacronym most kids know. ( STOP HIJACKING MY THREADS!!! ) :)

I have no confidence Twitter could thread based on your suggestions. Oddly, Threading has been solved in mostall coment interactive systems. Twitter is the largest interactive comment system we’ve seen to date. People just like to call it other more fancy things.

Twitter is just a large 140 char message board.

I like your ideas, there are no shortages of methods to solve these problems. The problem is; the problem is not the technology it’s the Twitter technologists.

But I like that. As long as neutrality does not get fubar’d, anyone who can learn one of 20 various scripting languages is free to give it a go their own way.

Twitters API even gets you right up against their system if you want to piggyback. Too bad Twitter uses only a fraction of their own API for their operations. If Twitter ate 100% of their own API dogfood, we may not be talking about this.

If their tools are identical to our tools (API), nothing but feirce competition would result.

Nice post. Well said. Now go hit up that JSON and Restful API and make it happen. Use a firefox plug-in. According to my stats, the lions share of Twitter is still web based ( twatagent.com ) for metrics on twiter user agents.

By: Guest Post: How I increased traffic 1,176% in 24 hours – Watching Websites

Guest Post: How I increased traffic 1,176% in 24 hours – Watching Websites — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:36:22 +0000

[...] in new ways, and all the things that encompasses – user-centric design, productivity, human-computer interfaces and exploring social trends. He used to work for IBM UK, specializing in Voice systems, Java and [...]

By: Measure Your Metrics – Google Analytics Alerts: the start of a complete view? | Blog of Jon

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:40:23 +0000

[...] lets you look for specific occurrences even before they happen. Consider @alexbfree’s recent post on Twitter Retweeting, which got picked up by Dave Winer. You can set up an alert to see if Dave sends you [...]

By: How (slowly) we add metadata to tweets « News, Software and All you need

How (slowly) we add metadata to tweets « News, Software and All you need — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:30:37 +0000

[...] get an idea of what’s possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out? [...]

By: pyxzer

pyxzer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:48:17 +0000

Yes, please.

By: Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:31:28 +0000

Joseph, you’re right, and there’s probably a big advantage for Twitter too in data storage savings as well.

Having the tweet only show up once may not be a great thing for people who just dip into Twitter every now and then – it means you might miss something which is actually being talked about by a lot of people, because it only shows up once in your stream.

I’d prefer to see it once per mention, and have a “don’t show me this again” option, rather than only show it once by default. But again I suspect it’s a personal preference.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:08:15 +0000

What’s nice about the new retweet feature is all retweets collapse down into a single item in my timeline. That way I don’t have to see the same retweet a dozen times. Unfortunately there’s not a great design for collapsing and allowing commenting.

By: Steve Trefethen

Steve Trefethen — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:41:47 +0000

Nice description RT, of the problem and an elegant solution. Good job!

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:23:37 +0000

Really like the ‘request more’ idea to get round the SMS character limit.

As for the retweeting, I still think that the Twitter design covers a straight retweet pretty well. If you’re commenting on a tweet (agreeing/disagreeing/expanding on/asking for views on/etc.) a reply does seem to cover the metadata side already. Perhaps just rename ‘Reply’ to ‘Respond’? (And maybe display things as you suggest above.)

By: Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:01:36 +0000

Hi James, you're absolutely right, there is a problem with SMS updates, which are essentially individual updates where almost no context is possible (due to the 160 character limit). But I don't think this problem is unique to my proposal. As Dave Winer observes, there are many kinds of metadata about a tweet, of which retweet is just one. And none of them can easily be included in the SMS. You can't easily find out which message a tweet is "in reply to" via SMS either - making conversations already hard to follow by SMS - nor can you browse the rest of the hashtag which the message might reference. Depending on your connectivity you may not be able to follow a URL included. Unfortunately the SMS limits the scope of what can be done. I think this is a separate technical problem to be solved - how do we communicate context/metadata alongside an SMS tweet. It's not a reason to try and force metadata inside the 140 character limit or discard paradigms for the main interfaces. Perhaps a single link in an SMS could include all the metadata. Facebook solves it by letting you "request more" by replying with a "n" for next message. Or perhaps MMS could be used to attach additional metadata and context. As for the similarity to reply, perhaps you're right, I didn't choose the best of examples. Here's a better example. I tweeted something, and @bookoven opened it up to a question to their audience. Really a retweet is a forward not a reply... but critically it's a forward with comment.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:51:16 +0000

Agreed, that does seem like a nice alternative, but what would a Luddite like me with SMS updates get? “Agreed” … er, agreed what? Plus it does seem almost identical to a reply, which you can do right now- same metadata just no @alexbfree in front.

By: Google Analytics Alerts: the start of a complete view? – Watching Websites

Google Analytics Alerts: the start of a complete view? – Watching Websites — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:39:27 +0000

By: Twitter’s Intelligent, Welcome to Web 3.0 « emergent by design

Twitter’s Intelligent, Welcome to Web 3.0 « emergent by design — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:21:02 +0000

[...] new retweet feature on Twitter and issues about attribution. He links to an article by Alex Bowyer, A better design for twitter retweets, which is a very well thought out post that deserves to be [...]

By: Kcecelia

Kcecelia — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:02:20 +0000

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I thought all the people who should have been objecting had become pod people. I am deeply unhappy about the new RT. I love your solution. How do we get Twitter folks to listen? Thanks for this. I was feeling so alone! And worse, I was feeling like a marginalized malcontent. And you know how painful that can be. :-)

By: Robert McKenney

Robert McKenney — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:12:54 +0000

This is an excellent article. The problems are clearly laid out and the solution is elegant. This has probably already been tweeted many times, but have not seen it, so I will post it again.

I hope that Twitter is listening!

Cheers,RLM.

By: Charles Baldwin

Charles Baldwin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:12:22 +0000

Over the last couple weeks, I have also noted and tweeted the limitations I’ve found in the new retweet format. Instinctively, I resist allowing someone to have this kind of control over what I “publish.” More and more, I’m moving to a twitter client like TweetDeck, so that I can edit a tweet before retweeting and replying.

Perhaps Chris Messina’s post about microsyntax (http://is.gd/53JyP) was a bit tongue-in-cheek, it does have merit. I have, in fact, begun to adopt it. For example, in the case of retweeting a retweet the format would be “/via @name2 @name1.” The order of attribution denoting the chronology. Regardless, your article here is full of thought provoking ideas.

By: Dave Winer

Dave Winer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:16:18 +0000

I started to write a comment here but it turned into a blog post.

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/25/whatsSoSacredAbout140.html

Dave

By: Jesse Luna

Jesse Luna — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:52:08 +0000

That appears to be an elegant solution to get Retweets working correctly. This isn’t much different than seeing tweets connected to replies via Twitter Seach so I don’t see any technical limitations. Ev’s post did imply that supporting Comments *were* planned for an upcoming version so hopefully they keep some of your key points in mind.~@JesseLuna

By: Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:44:23 +0000

Interestingly, you can now get a greasemonkey script which hacks the avatar display to show both the original poster and the retweeter:

http://bit.ly/5AxJ9F

This seems to support the idea that what Twitter have modeled isn’t what people want – some people want to see the retweeter not the original poster.

It also shows that if you force a community down a particular path, they will work against you to do continue to do what they want to do.