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The reviews roll in: New Retweet= #FAIL

By Shoq, on November 12, 2009, at 2:02 am

I just hate being right sometimes… wait, no I don't.

I love Twitter. Let's be clear on that.  But we can be critical of the things we love.

The reviews are already coming fast on "Project Retweet," and they're not pretty.

After the brief status blurb from CNET below, jump to the entire Lance Ulanoff article linked below. My merry band of followers will note the very same arguments from him that I've been making since I heard about this preposterously dopey idea.

New Coke.. I mean Retweets are down right now, and while that's probably just a glitch, some already speculate that Twitter may already see the writing on the wall, and have already shot the rabid dog before it could bite them in the ass.  Chow down, Rover!

CNET's Webware

Twitter issues mulligan on new 'retweet' feature

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

Lance Ulanoff, PCMagazine

Twitter Retweets: Thanks but No Thanks

Seriously? Are these guys not even aware of how their own service works? I'm not the only one who adds to RTs. It's an incredibly common practice, and I think it's what helps propel the never-ending Twitter conversation along.

Twitter Watch

Twitter's new retweet feature is the worst ever.

While current users may get used to the feature, it’s going to alienate new users. Twitter isn’t like Facebook; it can’t boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn’t subscribe to. To understand this, they’ll need to learn the meaning of a new symbol. I expect that in trying to understand it, many of them will end up accidentally retweeting messages they didn’t want to see in the first place.

Related

New Retweets: be Afraid

 

The reviews roll in: New Retweet= #FAIL
November 12th, 2009 | Category: Retweets, Support, Twitter
  • mcwbr
    Good suggestion. I intend to try your experiment. At the risk of eating crow, I'm going to bet right now that a 2nd newRT will also generate a doppleganger.

    It has occurred to me that the "doppleganger" might actually BE the new RT—that it's not a kludge to make 3rd party apps work, it's a kludge to make the new RTs work. The Dilbert explanation is too long, but I had assumed the new RT would be a new weak entity in the database, with a pointer to the original tweet, a pointer to the retweeter and a date-time stamp. Maybe not.
  • mcwbr
    ...How do I know it's a copy? I created a 140 character tweet and new RT'd it. The copy was truncated. The new RT was not.
  • mcwbr
    I found this out by experimenting with two accounnts: When you use the new RT, it also generates what appears to be a classic RT. You can only see it, though, if you do a search. It will not show up in normal home timeline of a 3rd party app such as TweetDeck.

    Say I new RT @Sally. Sally will see it on the web, but not in Tweetdeck home timeline. (Nor will anyone else using a 3rd Party app) However, if Sally creates a search column "@Sally," she will see a copy of the new RT (Providing Twitter is not dumping my tweets because it's busy)

    If Sally is using a browser and clicks the @Sally sidebar, she also won't see the RT. But she will if she does a search "@Sally."

    I think this RT copy was meant to be a kludge that would allow 3rd party apps to see the new RT. But it's not working for some reason. I can only speculate that it has to do with a database stored procedure that is called from the API, and that the same stored procedure is called from the sidebar link. The stored proc fires a query that for some reason filters out the retro RT generated by the new RT, so the kludge doesn't work.

    Back when Twitter was asking for comments about the new RT, I informed them of this. It should be a simple thing to fix, but so far they haven't.

    If you do a search on "@Shoq" you will see a new-style RT I created to demonstrate.
  • Very interesting. But now you have to test to see if the doppleganger is generated if you are the 2nd retweeter of the same item. If you're correct, I would think it must be, thus, that's a huge amount of replication. It could also be an interim bug, or a test. I would try it again in a few days.
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