Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

What’s Not to Like About Twitter’s New Retweet Feature?

Twitter is of course in the process of rolling out a new retweet feature. The feature adds a retweet button to each tweet on your timeline, much like the “reply” button that has always been there. However, one distinct difference between these two buttons is that where the reply button fills out your form with the proper information (”@username”), the retweet button sends the initial tweet to your followers’ timelines without giving you your own tweet.

Do you prefer the old way of retweeting or the new way? Share your thoughts here.

In other words, you don’t get to add anything to it, you’re just duplicating a tweet that came to you and sending it to your followers. You’re forwarding it.



There are things to like about the feature. For one it’s more convenient if you just want to pass on an interesting tweet. If you’re the one being retweeted, it puts you in the spotlight in other people’s streams rather than the person who retweeted you. It kind of feels like you’re getting more credit for your tweets, although if you are just tweeting a link to someone else’s blog post that might not necessarily come off as a positive. Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting blog post last week defending the feature before it even had much of a chance to get torn apart by users. He knew it would be controversial, and he even acknowledged that fact.

As happens when any heavily-used site makes changes, some people get upset about it. Lisa Barone at outSpoken Media made a list of “things that suck” about the new retweet feature, and she brings up a number of good points, but her biggest peeve seems to be that of the avatars of people she doesn’t know showing up in her stream.

“Showing the unfamiliar avatar does not give me ‘more context’ for the tweet. It gives me less because I don’t know this individual,” she says. “If I were to see Rae’s avatar, I’d know to trust the content. I’d know it already passed the snuff test. When I see someone else’s avatar, I’m thrown off and confused. Will I get used to it? No, I’ll simply learn to ignore things from people I don’t know.”

She has a valid point in that seeing unfamiliar faces can be a bit off-putting, but aren’t the retweets still passing the “snuff test” since they are still being retweeted by people you follow? It’s not like these “strangers” are actually coming in and spamming us. It’s just a visually different way of presenting them. Whether or not we like that is one thing, but it’s a retweet from someone we’re following just as it was before in this regard. A great many Twitter users probably don’t even recognize half of the people they follow anyway.

That said, there are a number of other issues with the feature, as Barone points out. Some of the ones she touches on are:

- Can’t add own commentary (what if you don’t agree with what you’re retweeting?)

- Plays down user’s visibility in own network

- Changes the definition of retweeting (makes it more like a Facebook “like”)

The feature is still in limited beta testing, so regardless of what you feel about the feature, there is a possibility it will change. Even still, if you don’t like the feature, you don’t have to use it. You can still use the classic “RT” method just as you have always done. You just have a new option now. Depending on how many of the people you follow use the new feature, your Twitter experience can be affected more or less by it.

Are you getting the new retweet feature yet? What is your opinion? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it. Tell WebProNews readers what you think about it.

Related Articles:

> An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter

> Wonder What Percentage of Tweets are Retweets?

> More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

Facebook Sends Cease And Desist To Friend-Seller

uSocial is a controversial advertising company that specializes in social media.  For a fee, it promises to get stories on the front page of Digg, direct followers to a Twitter account, and/or find someone Facebook fans (among other things).  But Facebook’s put at least a temporary stop to the sale of friends.

The BBC reported this afternoon, “Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.”

As a result, “USocial defended itself against Facebook’s claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles. . . .  However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends.”

This is an interesting development insofar as, three months ago, Twitter also tried to crack down on uSocial.  Its back-channel methods apparently didn’t succeed, but now that Facebook’s established a precedent, we might see another attempt.  Delicious, Digg, and Reddit could well join the fight, too.

Of course, the hubbub around such a scuffle would act as free advertising for uSocial and might spread the notion that these social media sites can be gamed, so it’s also possible that absolutely nothing will occur.

Related Articles:

> Facebook Puts Privacy Policy In Users’ Hands

> Facebook Blocks Popular iLike App

> Want More Facebook Friends?

Survey Finds 30% of College Faculty Use Twitter

Faculty Focus released some interesting findings from a survey about Twitter usage and trends among college faculty. They surveyed about 2,000 faculty members and found that about a third of the respondents say they use Twitter. Over half say they have never used Twitter at all.

“One of the more interesting findings from the survey is the high percentage of faculty who use Twitter, even if they’re still experimenting with the best ways to incorporate it into their courses,” says Mary Bart, content manager for Faculty Focus. “What also became quite apparent was how strongly Twitterers and non-Twitterers feel about the technology.”

Participants were asked if they use Twitter, and depending upon how they responded, they were asked a unique set of follow-up questions. Here are some key findings from the survey:

- 21.9 percent of respondents say they are “familiar” or “very familiar” with Twitter.

- Of those who use Twitter, 21 percent say they “frequently” use it to collaborate with colleagues; 15.6 percent do so “occasionally.”

- Of those who use Twitter, 7.2 percent “frequently” use it as a learning tool in the classroom; 9.4 percent do so “occasionally.”

- 71.8 percent of current Twitterers expect their usage to increase this school year.

- 20.6 percent of current non-Twitter users say there is a “50/50 chance” they will use Twitter as a learning tool in the classroom in the next two years.

- 12.9 percent of respondents say they tried Twitter, but stopped using it because it took too much time, they did not find it valuable, or a combination of reasons.

It is worth noting that the majority (55.9%) of participants are actually professors or instructors, while about a fourth were academic leaders, such as department chairs and deans. 16% fell into the “other” category, which includes faculty development, academic advisement, instructional design, marketing, admissions, assessment, and library services.

More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters “RT” to somebody else’s tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. “Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting,” says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

As a Twitter user, what is your opinion of the concept of retweeting? Share with WebProNews readers.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at “RT” (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called ” Project Retweet,” which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the “like” feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your “likes” on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be “noise” on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old “content is king” cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole “Retweet vs. Like” concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.