{"id":648,"date":"2009-11-18T18:18:59","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T23:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.adam-jackson.net\/?p=648"},"modified":"2009-11-18T18:18:59","modified_gmt":"2009-11-18T23:18:59","slug":"twitters-new-retweet-feature-the-5-minute-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2009\/11\/18\/twitters-new-retweet-feature-the-5-minute-review\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2605 Twitter’s new ReTweet Feature: The 5 Minute Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Just a few minutes ago, I logged into Twitter.com to verify something and saw this glorious goodness:<\/p>\n

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That’s actually not my screengrab, I stole it from this guy<\/a> but I do now regret not screen-grabbing the feature for later use. I’ve long expressed my “distaste<\/a>” of the new feature but, as usual, Adam should have kept his mouth shut until actually trying it because now I can see exactly the kind of power RT has now that it’s an official feature. It was well thought out and takes retweeting to the next level in a very logical way.<\/p>\n

The Basics:<\/strong>
\nFirst of all, I had to go back a page or two to find a tweet that was retweeted by someone else. It turns out Evan Williams retweeted someone named Rael who I’ve seen mentioned by friends here and there. As I scrolled over that tweet, it looks like Twitter has added a “tip” that says, “Wondering who this is?” with some info as to why you’re seeing that person in your stream. This is an excellent way to avoid any “freak-outs” that we’ve seen in the past from a few celebrities that got the feature early on.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

I’m writing this assuming you’re a Twitter power user and understand what retweeting is. If you’re not, this blog post<\/a> should get you started. The retweeting feature of Twitter.com allows you to retweet any interesting tweet you see with 2 clicks. Click “retweet” and confirm that’s what you want to do as Twitter lets you know this will be tweeted to all of your followers. You won’t see the retweet in your main \/home page on Twitter. Why? Well, we’ll get to that later. People that are following you that have the new feature enabled will see someone’s\u00a0 face in their stream that they’re not following and it will say that they were retweeted by you. They can also retweet that person as well but to their followers, it won’t show your name and will just say retweeted by “3 others” up to infinity I’m guessing.<\/p>\n

If the person following you does not have the feature yet, they’ll simply see your face like usual with RT and then the tweet and it will look just like it did before the new feature so there’s no weirdness for people following you that don’t have it yet.<\/p>\n

Discovery:<\/strong>
\nI’ve written a lot of lessons about discovery and mindshare and, personally, I found myself taking additional time when scanning the stream of data just to look at tweets that started with RT. The RT means it was retweeted and is something important. My fear was having a new face in my stream would throw me off (thinking I accidentally followed someone) but instead, on Twitter.com they made the UI understandable enough that if you saw the RT logo (a little square stamp) you could, over time, start ignoring them or paying more attention to them just like you did when you saw RT before a tweet before. The image is more recognizable and thus easier to filter as our brain interprets data and catalogs it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So my first gripe was out and I’m happy about that. The RT will be missed but until Twitter rolls it out site-wide, we’ll be seeing it for a while. Plus, any 3rd party Twitter applications that don’t support Twitter’s ReTweet API, will still do the old fashioned way and since it’s text, Twitter won’t be able to block it. For those of you that prefer the old method, no one is stopping you from simply copying someone’s tweet and putting RT in front of it. Over time, more apps will support the new method.<\/p>\n

Discovery is key. RT wasn’t just a way to share someone else’s tweet with your followers; it was a way to give kudos, thanks or a thumbs up to someone. Sharing, re-blogging or quoting is a way to show your appreciation and spread the word to people you follow. Twitter users love being retweeted. The thing about RTs is that I never gained any significant amount of followers from it. I’m sure many followers of people that retweeted me, saw my post or my link but not many clicked through to follow me. That might be changing. I saw this reply today just after using the RT feature and talking about it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So, Hans-J\u00f6rn actually discovered me through a retweet of someone else. This makes complete sense because humans are visual creatures so my face appearing in his timeline (since he has the new retweet feature) triggered an awareness to my content and despite what my message was that was retweeted, he may have a trust with the person who retweeted me so w\/ my face, content and “recommendation” from a friend, Hans felt confident enough to click “follow” next to my name. This was never possible prior to the new feature being enabled.<\/p>\n

The Finer Details:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to note a couple of things that were interesting. Another one of my fears was that guys like Ashton Kutcher or websites like TechCrunch that have millions of followers and thus get retweeted hundreds of times would fill my stream. Everytime a new TechCrunch post is tweeted out, dozens of my friends tweet out the link that it’s hard to concentrate. The new retweet feature only enables you to see that status one time. Let me drill down into this a bit more.<\/p>\n

I follow @Ev on Twitter. He posts something 10 minutes ago and 10 of my friends retweet it. I’ll never see those retweets because I already saw his tweet (since I’m following him). Sure, there’s a likelihood that I wasn’t looking at Twitter when he posted the update, but Twitter would rather not fill your stream with duplicate tweets. To back up just a bit, it’s important to remember that anyone simply putting, “RT @Ev….” as a text retweet, I’ll still see those because it’s text. This is an example of retweet content that will continue to live on for some time:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The same rule applied to people I’m following. I retweeted a post from @Ev. I refreshed my Twitter.com\/home page and saw that my RT wasn’t showing up! The reason is that since I’m following him, it won’t show in the stream but if I navigate to \/AdamJackson on Twitter (which is my public profile view), the Retweet does show up. This minor experience decision from Twitter will mean the stream is less spammy and thus solves one of my major gripes about the RT feature.<\/p>\n

When a retweeted post says, “retweeted by 21 people” you can’t actually see who those people are. Earlier designs showed a view of Twitter avatars from people who retweeted it but it seems that was scrapped or just temporarily disabled. That’s totally fine because it’s distracting. I’d like to be able to click the number and see a list of people who retweeted. Further expansion on this since Twitter is now organizing the data differently would be to show leader boards by the amount of retweets but I guess I’ll have to stick to TweetMeme for now. Here is what the old retweet method looked like in earlier mockups.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s how it looks now:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You can also now “undo” a retweet. Instead of the option to “delete” a retweet which might serve as confusing since it looks like you’re deleting the original person’s tweet (not technically possible but could be confusing to some), this undo button makes more sense that you’re undoing your retweet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A final granular feature that I think is extremely important is the time stamp of the person’s original tweet is accurate since Scoble tweeted this out “9 hours ago” that’s the time stamp that is maintained when my followers see his face on my stream. Remember, people that follow him won’t see it. When I hover over the “you” area which is you or whoever retweeted it, I see a timestamp for when I actually retweeted it which was 31 minutes ago.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In Conclusion:<\/strong>
\nI wanted to mention that this was only after 5-10 minutes of using the new retweet feature. This was a feature I was pretty against when the screen shots first appeared last month but now that it’s being rolled out, I’m very impressed. Let’s keep in mind that this is still in beta and rumors say that it’s only being rolled out to 5% of users but the new feature will work with 3rd party clients via the API and I can expect even more good things from this new implementation as Twitter continues to improve the way it functions. Overall, I’m pleased with it and look forward to seeing where it goes next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just a few minutes ago, I logged into Twitter.com to verify something and saw this glorious goodness: That’s…\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_custom_appearance":"","csco_disable_excerpt_posts_layout":false,"csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-social-media","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"apple_news_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pb3IC4-as","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7475,"url":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2018\/06\/05\/linked-airpods-to-get-live-listen-feature-in-ios-12\/","url_meta":{"origin":648,"position":0},"title":"Linked: “AirPods to get Live Listen feature in iOS 12”","author":"Adam Chandler","date":"June 5, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"AirPods to get Live Listen feature in iOS 12 | TechCrunch: After enabling the feature in the iPhone\u2019s settings, users will be able to use their phones effectively as a directional mic. This means you can have AirPods in at a noisy restaurant with your iPhone on the table, for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Linked"","block_context":{"text":"Linked","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/category\/linked\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2177,"url":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2011\/04\/11\/windows-app-store-design-copies-apple-google\/","url_meta":{"origin":648,"position":1},"title":"\u2605 Windows App Store Design Copies Apple & Google","author":"Adam Chandler","date":"April 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"MG Siegler: Last year,\u00a0we ripped Google for ripping off the design of Apple\u2019s App Store for their Chrome Web Store. This actually might be worse. It looks almost as if Microsoft is ripping off Google ripping off Apple. Again,\u00a0allegedly\u00a0\u2014 the shots aren\u2019t confirmed. 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