Over the weekend a lot of tech bloggers got into a tizzy over a suggestion that Twitter search should rank Tweets by authority, with Tweets from people who have the most followers coming up first. Some bloggers quickly objected that this was somehow undemocratic or would give spammers more of an incentive to trick people into following them, and thus would be easy to game. One developer went ahead and created exactly that search experience with Twitority anyway. (Update: Make that two, check out Twithority also). While others didn’t understand what the big deal was in the first place because their relatives in Scranton have never heard of Twitter (sigh).
One thing that is clear is that there needs to be a better way to filter Twitter (which is a finalist for a Crunchies Award this year) as it grows into a broader public communications and publishing system. I like to think of Twitter as public IM. But with possibly more than one billion Tweets out there, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? What is the best way to measure the authority of a Tweet (and, thus, where it should rank as a Twitter search result)?
A better proxy for authority than the absolute number of followers someone has on Twitter may be how many times their messages get retweeted. Retweeting occurs when someone takes an original message on Twitter (a Tweet), sticks an “RT” in front of it, and spreads it further to their followers. It’s another way to separate some signal out of the cacophony of Twitter.
These numbers are, of course, related because the more followers someone has, the more likely that one of their messages will be retweeted. But they are not exactly the same. For instance, here are the top 100 people on Twitter ranked by number of followers and here is another list ranked by the number of retweets. Guy Kawasaki is No. 1 on the Retweet list (his messages have been retweeted 335 times in the past week), and is No. 9 on the followers list (with 40,496 followers). Not surprisingly, he thinks looking at retweets is the way to go (so he tells me).
The nice thing about retweets is that it offers a potential way to sort though not just people on Twitter, but their individual Tweets. An important Tweet that gets replicated around the world from someone with 5 followers or less (which is a third of all Twitterers), should have more authority than a Tweet from Kawasaki or Robert Scoble or even Barack Obama that has no impact.
You could go even deeper than just the number of retweets a person has. An even better proxy might be the number of retweets per follower. Someone with a high ratio might be worth listening to more than someone with simply a lot of followers.
Looking at the propagation of retweets is also helpful. Dan Zarella, the man behind the retweet list, recently crunched some numbers and found that most retweets die after the second retweet. That is they get picked up by one follower and that’s it. Only 7.57 percent get retweeted again. But the retweeting rate then grows after that. He refers to it as the “depth” (See chart below). Messages that have ben retweeted three times have an 11.47 percent chance of being retweeted again. By the time a message has been retweeted five times, it has a 48.44 percent chance of being retweeted. I would love see all Tweets that have been retweeted three or more times, especially whenever I do a Twitter search.
The problem with retweets I suspect is that not many people use them or even know what they are. What’s with all the abbreviated commands on Twitter, anyway? How hard would it be for Twitter to add a retweet button or link, at least as an option? (In fact, they should take the most popular commands and turn them into buttons—usage would skyrocket).
Then, just as Webpages and Websites have different link authority, individual Tweets and Twitterers could gain retweet authority. A Website that gains link authority over time has an advantage over others, just as someone like Kawasaki has an advantage over other Twitterers by dint of how often his messages have been retweeted in the past.
Slowest news day, this year, I guess…
Isn’t this twittering crap dead yet?
Honestly, who the hell uses this? Besides a handful of tech bloggers who think they’re more than important than they really are, NO ONE.
…and it’ll NEVER catch on beyond the tech enthusiast, mark my words.
Why?
Because “twittering” makes NO SENSE. It’s somewhere between a text message, an instant message and an email…and there’s just no reason to have it. It’s sortof like “micro blogging” via Tumblr. You either write nothing or something. Anything inbetween is ultimately a waste of time and energy.
God, I really hope twittering is the first thing to go in ‘09.
Twitter..Twitter..Twitter..
I just feel like yelling out “Stop this Twitter sh!t, A**h****s”
exactly – it’s a service for the same few thousand people who use most of the crap that’s on techcrunch…part of a larger mutual admiration society and praised within the largest echo chamber in all of tech!
retweets mean nothing – for repeating something does not correlate with significance or influence – and once again, TC presents a worthless and moronic model for measurement and still understands nothing about information reliability and credibility….and such metric is simple to game.
Seriously, alleged adults espousing the merits of “tweets”? They’re all a bunch of twits. Of course, in their world they’re on some sort of “A-list” but they’re still a bunch of twits.
GTFU
In a recent post I did on Are You Retweetable? (http://www.todd...ou-retweetable/) I got a comment from Saurabh Sahni — an engineer at MyBlogLog — about a hack he did along these lines. Check it out:
http://www.retweetrank.com/
Apart from the leaderboard, at retweetrank you can get rank for any twitter user which is representative of the number of times they have been retweeted. With rank, recent retweets are listed which can also be grabbed as an RSS feed.
Find your retweetrank here: http://www.retweetrank.com/
It makes more sense with counting in retweets, but then again, we´re only at the beginning of qualitative search in Twitter.
The quality of Twitority at the moment is like the quality of websearch when Altavista hit the web:-)
Useless. Excluding the occasional public service during emergencies, Re-Tweets are predominately made by people incapable of writing anything of meaning themselves.
WTF is it with this whole “Twitter Authority” meme? By design, Twitter punishes loud mouths who use it just to promote themselves, never participating in a meaningful way ( *couch*Arrington*cough* ).
Here’s a tip to all the PR and Marketing people out there who think establishing a “Twitter Authority” metric will some how save their ass from budget cuts and result in billable hours – Give up. Delete your Twitter account and go back to spamming with email “blasts” circa 1999.
Respect my Authoritae!
The comment from Comment really made me smile.
It has to be said though, it is interesting to see how people literally show signs of hate for something that is beyond their comprehension.
The power of twitter, for me, is in knowledge. In real time I have Scoble, Kawasaki, O’Reilly – leading thinkers (and doers) in the industry posting short and sweet tweets. Even less known bloggers/designers like Paddy Donnelly who are great, real and knowledgeable characters:
http://iampaddy.com
These go into my favourites (UK), and I read them when free from work. Each and everyone has been hugely enlightening.
Here is some inspiration for designers:
Here is some inspiration for bloggers:
guykawasaki Ten most beautiful blogs of 2008 http://ping.fm/9ZtIK
Here is some inspiration for entrepreneurs:
http://blog.guy...rt_of_the_.html
http://www.yout...h?v=L3xaeVXTSBg
(Admit I had the above links before Twitter, but then following Guy has yesterday given me the below link – which many of you will like:)
http://www.idea...1/startup_fail/
Here is some motivation for investors:
“timoreilly @davemc500hats: re Peter Rip “The Coming Venture Capital Boom” http://tinyurl.com/8ycf93 I agree that now is time to invest.”
I could post so many more links than I have ever bothered to bookmark (’favorite’) from crawling even great discovery sites etc. Again the key is that these thoughts, these links, and their knowledge – comes directly from people that not only put their money where their mouth is, but shape the industry… Big or small fish, their impact is always beyond moderate.
RT @socialmedian “@techcrunch how many times you get retweeted only measures the echo. How many public @replies measures the conversation” — Agreed.
@replies could be a factor too. Now we’re getting closer to an actual algorithm. What else should we include, and how should each factor be weighted?
I’m still not sure what to make of EVERYONE wanting to be part of deciding:
1) What’s twitter’s business model? (how many crap blog posts, and comments, has anyone read about that?)
2) What features should twitter have?
3) What features should twitter search have
Maybe it is twitter’s very open system (API and messages)? I don’t think twitter is a crowdsourced operation and it must be kinda depressing for the founders to read about how everyone thinks something_they_never_conceived_of_themselves is something they now should provide the vision for
Eric,
Although @replies could be a factor, it reverts back to the fact that someone with an extremely large follower base, will undoubtedly have more @replies based on sheer numbers alone. So, this could be a factor, but should carry less weight, than say RT numbers.
Of course, the challenge with having the amount of RT’s being the authority factor, is you would then start to see the words, “Please RT” at the end of every Tweet, possibly then shortened to “PRT” due to space constraint.
Also, “I’ll RT yours if you RT mine” would come into play, similar to the miriad of Link Exchange programs out there.
It’s an extremely difficult scenario, either way, because just as “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder” – “Relevant Content is in the eye of the Searcher”. The only one who can measure whether the content of a Tweet is relevant… is the one searching.
Thanks for the post!
Bradley
@OutsideMyBrain
Great comment. I totally agree since there are not always times that retweet but I will reply.
@jayphilips
-at least the twitter self-promoters aren’t showing up to give their blessings, or should I say “kudos”?
-twitter must have taken over the web this weekend (note: downtimes ATT/ Level3). Twitter is now to be self-aware in 2010 and must be stopped! blame loic le medue
-the blogosphere is in a state of perpetual april 1st:
I like this much better than the authority ranking idea. If Twitter is not an echo chamber, which I think most of us hope, then measuring the distance of your message across the medium is a great way to measure authority … or at least relevance.
Good post.
Actually, it’s all about goatees: when you shave them off and the frequency of tweets once said shaving is noticed by your Tweeps.
It’s true. I’ve gone smooth and seen my paratweet rating decline.
(note use of paratweet term already seen in the wild here http://search.t...rch?q=paratweet )
I wonder if the same thing will happen to Chris Brogan. According to my survey, most people liked Lumberjack Brogan better than the new cleanshaven Teen Brogan.
Who cares? Ha, just kidding (sorta).
I think the real purpose of this post is to propagate the term “retweet”. I mean come on! I already am embarassed whenever I say “tweet” in public. I will never use the word “retweet”.
Anyway, I think the bigger idea is: a) Twitter is growing into something no one can control b) Your mom doesn’t Tweet.
Retweet! Say it. You know you want to.
I’d suggest the use of a parrot icon for any retweet UI additions.
Then you can give it a cutesy name like paratweet.
I wonder if attractive girls get retweeted more than guys? It would be an interesting experiment.
I’m a Guy and a guy, and I get retweeted a lot.
ummm your also thee Guy online who could put his name on any website and get traffic with a single tweet.
We’re getting closer.
While I definitely think retweets are more meaningful than something overly simplistic like follower count as a measure of Twitter “authority”, I maintain that there is no single metric which accurately reflects Twitter influence.
Frankly, the best we can hope for is a close approximation generated from a combination of different metrics. Measures of interactivity should factor most heavily into this. E.g. the number of @-replies per post, depth of retweets, etc.
Follower counts probably have a place, too, but not by themselves. I’ll keep this comment brief, but I’ve gone on in more detail over here.
I don’t care if it’s about followers, retweets, tweet volume or links. I do care about the relationships I build with everyday human beings. I care about learning about someone. I care about knowing that their day is good. I care about everyone sharing knowledge, inspiration, laughter and conversation.
Everything doesn’t have to be about popularity or numbers. It could be about people connecting and attempting to have some form of community. It could be about a single parent who’s sacrificing his/her social life to provide the proper nurturing for their child. It could be about a young man who doesn’t have a father and is seeking mentors to learn from. It could be about a kid who enjoys making people laugh.
You see, it could be almost about anything which bring people together. There are too many people on this planet to think the world belows only to a chosen few. We all start at the same level in life. We all die as well.
Authority has been a constant subject of scrutiny in the social sciences. There are different kinds of authority (parent-child, boss-employer, mentor-student) that occur over some issues but not others and that change over time. It often has less to do with the content of the communication than the relationship between the individuals (existing or one hoped for) and can be connected to ones reputation, at least in the professional arena.
Some analyses of authority try to take a quantitative perspective (i.e., the number of times a scientist is cited in others’ publications) but a lot of authority is in the eye of the beholder. Elliott Spitzer, for example, held a lot of power as governor of the state of New York and that authority basically vaporized.
Authority is not a fixed commodity and any measurement will need to delineate the field in which the authority operates and account for changes over time.
I think it would also be valuable for tech readers to understand that there are a whole lot of Twitter users who use the system to keep in touch with friends, who have nothing to do with the tech, pr, media, or marketing worlds. They don’t read Tech blogs, they’ve formed their own communities which rarely intersect with the people often found at the top of Top Twitterers list.
Add in the fact that Twitter is multinational and multilingual and you see how complicated it would be to define a reliable and consistent measure for “authority” without it being extremely narrowly defined.
I agree Liz. I suppose there is some value to measuring general “authority” or really it’s a measure of “visibility” when you look at RT’s or @replies or some combination. Though measuring the @replies is really hard to do accurately because I would say at least half of mine are in the form of comments on my facebook status due to the automatic update from when I tweet.
The thing to measure is importance in a localized network, that is your network. If the purpose is to determine which tweets to pay attention to as an individual then it involves culling your network and highlighting tweets in your stream that come from the people most influential to you. This is most likely who YOU @reply and RT the most. I currently scan my dm’s and @replies first and then scan through the the stream and pick out tweets to look at that are from people whose tweets I’ve liked in the past. I’ll unfollow someone who consistently provides NO value but will continue to follow even if they only occasionally have something interesting to say.
I am looking for a good news filter though which may use some generalized RT analysis and weight it with my own network responses. Anything like that exist out there?
http://www.twitter.com/tweric
Oh, come on: Let’s get some real math geeks in here and set several criteria: retweets, followers, updates, and then rank/weight those: I’ll grant weighting retweets highest…but then again exactly “who” retweets comes into question. And don’t forget that ratio: http://twitterr...om/Default.aspx
And don’t forget these two: Ratio of replies to tweets (http://twitter-...s.com/?mode=top) and ratio of link tweets to all tweets (http://twitter-...amp;quotient=lq)
I think that would have some validity in the short term. However, it is only a matter of time until the spammers with multiple Twitter identities start reving up their automated reTweet scripts to bolster their rankings…much like the ripoff artists on eBay who puff up their ratings by buying bogus items from bogus identities they control. Unfortunately, there’s always a way to game the system.
I would love it if someone could come up with a way to list people by their expertise or their most tweeted topics. Seems to me that would have more relevance than simply a measure of generic retweets.
In the meantime, I think people will simply have to suffer through a little manual due diligence on whom they follow and then decide whether they’re worthy of attention.
I totally disagree, the amount someone gets RT again comes back to how many followers they have (which as we know is easily gamed) and guess what the more someone is RT the more followers they get. Guykawasaki is like a broadcast network who follows people, spammers, and RT bots alike. If you auto follow and answer everyone and RT everyone you can build a very big network on twitter.
Go an read Clay Shirky’s article from 2003 on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality and you’ll understand why popularity on twitter means very little.
http://www.shir...law_weblog.html
Simple ideas can get spread far and wide on twitter but smaller more focused networks of passionate and productive people can get shit done
but that’s just how I use twitter, I don’t need 10’s of thousands of people RT the latest top ten list of how to write killer blog content, that’s a waste of time, time to focus on value.
http://experien...growth-to-value
When you do a search, though, the keywords you use will focus it for you. And if a niche expert on, say, user interfaces, gets retweeted more on that topic than Guy Kawasaki, he or she will come up first in that particular search.
The problem still comes down to the powerful network effects that twitter enables individuals to have and it heavily weights ‘popularity’. A UI expert that got on twitter first will have more weight using the RT algorithm than a more knowledgeable UI expert that gets on a year later. We really need a way to ‘detune’ the network effects, or at least be able to really understand authority in the context of niche. I’m afraid keyword+retweeted does not equal any authority, just popularity.
Dear Techcrunch,
Your coverage fails to impress anyone lately. Who gives a shit about a company that doesn’t know how to make money?
Oh, just Techcrunch.
Story couldn’t be more true. Being retweeted shows how valuable your content is.
However, odds are the more followers you have, the more retweets you will receive.
[groan] no, it’s not. As others are noting above (hmmm – others with a sharper reply but a fraction of the exposure of this foolish article) RTs are too much a function of followers/distribution. Authority by RT would be great for TechCrunch and (as usual) leave other views mostly high and dry.
Challenge to TC to prove the point:
1) Pick 10 blogs from Technorati *at random*
2) Have each write an article on a tech topic without author info.
3) Have TC readers rank the quality of the articles.
Prediction: C list insights = or > A list insights
(Sure Mike, I’ll fully fund costs to run this contest)
No, the data suggests otherwise. Read the post by Dan Zarella I link to above: http://danzarre...ets-spread.html
After looking at the data, he concludes:
“. . . while users who have more followers get ReTweeted more often, the number of followers plays a less-than-expected role in predicting how widely something is ReTweeted. I expect to find that the actual content of Tweets explains more of its ‘ReTweetability’.”
The key is the depth of the stream, those messages that go beyond the first circle of followers to the the 3rd, 4th, and beyond. Zarella finds:
“it does become clear that there is no significant correlation between either follower number and the depth of a stream.”
Erick – huh? – as I read it that data supports my two points:
1) More followers = more RTs. Ergo RTs are not a good measure of authority, just followership.
2) Depth of the RTs is not correlated with followers. Depth is arguably getting into pretty *good* measure of content quality since it’s been run through a gauntlet of people. The study found that depth and followers are not correlated.
Ergo, followers are a crappy measure and RTs are not much better. I think you could make a case from this for granting high authority to twitter folks who had a lot of deeply followed RTs.
Ergo, you are a giant douche!
Thank you for putting me in my place Alex.
You are a mental giant. Send resume.
YES! RT button! ( And a “reply all” to all the @usernames mentioned in a tweet please– and don’t count the @username in the 140 please!)
Counting RT may be a key element yet still not a viable measurement until more people know how to do it properly. I’ve been active a few months and am still learning things you all seem to take for granted–yet I seem to know more about how to Twitter than many of my followers.
The other aspect about RT’ing is what kinds of things are generally deemed worthy of RT’ing Political situations, emergencies, industry-relevant links, etc on a more global level compared to personal situations that will be RT like wildfire. Eg, @username’s daughter finally getting a kidney transplant gets RT a lot. Does that mean she has authority if she tweets her views, recommends or complains about something–or does it simply mean that she has a caring support network for personal issues? Does one necessarily follow the other?
The challenge is still how to quantify the human factor.
And, why does this matter? It feels like quantifying someone’s Tweet Authority is simply a means to ROI ends. Was that Twitter’s Mission all along–or after the fact to further self-sustainability?
It seems to me the arrows in the graph should be bi-directional; Just because userA is a rock star does not mean my search results should focus on him/her more than userB, particularly if I don’t care about userA as much as I do about userB.
F*&k Twitter, Tweeter, etweeter. tweener weiner, weiner lovers. If Techcrunch continues to obsess about these GAY 2.0 websites, I’ll start to think your leader is a bit fruity. Get some ballz and start covering real deal websites
If most of you guys just followed people you know or really want to get feedback from this would became a no-issue!
Why are people following thousands of people they don’t even know who they are???
flowersbyfarha has a good point. And I have noticed that I only get retweets from guys. I use Slandr mobile, which has a retweet button. It makes RT so much easier than with the actual Twitter.
This is a great one for the tweeter fans. (4 out of 5). Ronald H. of RevenueHerald.com
Erik –
Neat discussion. This is a CEO question and a fun one to tackle.
A few options exist in addition to what you mentioned. I’ll use examples to illustrate:
1. Delicious – tagging
2. Friend Feed – # comments (they could do this, they don’t…yet.)
3. Stumble/Digg – voting
4. Facebook – personal preference
Retweet is a similar concept to voting. Twitter should create one global page like digg that is based on the best tweets as voted upon by users.
Then they should allow users to change the frequency of how often certain friends’ tweet appear in their individual accounts (the facebook approach).
Twitority doesn’t seem to work too well: I tried a search on gaza and there were very few results and #gaza gave none. Needless to say, there should be hundreds (or thousands) of results. Presumably this is because unlike summize, they don’t have access to the full feed.
It’s all good and well for a big company like techcrunch and all their friends to say “Oh, we need to filter high priority tweets out to find out whats important” but what they don’t realise here is that this is just making it a lot harder for people without many followers to gain new followers.
I can’t believe this much of a post went into a topic about retweets. Hilarious. I love twitter as much as the next guy, but this is still pretty funny. Agree with the first poster, slow news day.
Twitter = another High School-ish popularity contest…
…follow me! I’m a winner! I’m cool! I promise!
Erick – you know it would take nothing to get people parroting ….retweeting, right?
These twitter sites all seem to be a bit pointless. I registered http://www.twilitist.info in the hope that some blogger will say something slightly relevent. These sites are annoying finite – look at DMfail; it lasted 1/2 days?
Do you know if this website is owned by amazon?
http://amazonbe...t.blogspot.com/
Just like Google considers relevancy in its SERP first before PageRank, authority should legitimately only be determined on a concept/topic/keyword basis. So Guy Kawasaki may have great startup authority but I’ll bet someone else has more authority on mom & baby topics. Retweeting is important, but so are @replies, especially with people who have similar authority.
And what I want to know is who has the most authority for those things that I am interested in?
It should probably take into consideration the authority of those people someone follows and what they tweet and who they rewteet and how often, and who they @reply to to determine authority for a given concept/topic/keyword. Clustering analysis of concepts/topics/keywords would be important too.
It would all be iteratively calculated, just like Google PageRank. Hmm, maybe this is the plan for my next startup…?
OOOOHH {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/t0oQiGcs4V_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”OOOOHH ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/kHwyVHsOJJ”}}}
you actually put a face to this comment/ramble?
check out http://www.retweetradar.com/ to see RT trends
Great post. Thanks. Well done. Good work. Bravo. Keep up the good work.
You knew it had to happen: start a Retweet Chain at http://www.RTchain.com
Sad, and utterly frustrating. The idea that retweets should be a primary measure of authority is completely wrong-headed.
Unsubscribing TechCrunch. Finally. UGH.
oh please noooooo now everyone will say “please RT this” instead of “Please digg this” – or “I need 3 more followers to reach 100″or whatever dampens interesting conversation
This is like a Google rank algorithm. So many things to take into account. Not just how many times you’re retweeted, but how many tweets you send out, how many followers you have, the time of day your tweet goes out. # of Replies doesn’t translate directly. A controversial statement will elicit many responses.
I think we really must stop looking at it in black and white. ALL of these variables matter, I’d like to see someone come up with a secret sauce to rank authority…Hello TSEO! Twitter Search Engine Optimization
I agree. IF Twitter is more than a fad then there is profit in a secret authority ranking algorithm merged with great presentation much like Google has done.
- Curtis
http://ShipItOnTheSide.com – Learn to ship profitable software as a side job.
except ‘not many people use them or even know what they are’.
I think ranking results by retweets will be just as open to gaming the system as it would be simply using the number of followers.
Eric, great article. It opens up a conversation about a fascinating subject: influence, and how we can measure it. Retweets and followers are a measure, but so is how many times your Twitter name comes up in others tweets. Mine is @curtisgray. And so the more influential one is, the more their twitter name comes up in tweets.
In other words, we should count REPLIES in the formula.
Since it’s not hard to game any system (creating lots of users to reply to and retweet yourself and thus seem more influential is not hard to do) so we must continually upgrade the search rankings, much like Google does on the web.
The great thing is that this is a problem worth studying and if we continue to plug away at it we can create a more objective way to measure influence.
- Curtis
http://ShipItOnTheSide.com – Learn to ship profitable software as a side job.
how many times is twitter going to get covered? seriously…how many more times?
Is retweeting just copying the URL that was posted by someone else, or is there a button to push in the process?
Agreed. The number of retweets is a better measure of one’s authority than sheer number of followers.
UNTIL we start paying too much attention to it, at which point it loses its value.
http://bsoist.w...ed-by-retweets/
I agree with Ronald that relationships are what count. Building relationships take effort and time It iss very hard to quantify. In our research for Zentact, we found that the number of followers on twitter and for that matter the number of contacts in LinkedIn did not inherently correlate with the number of relationships one might have.
Retweeting can be done for many reasons – because the retweeter thinks it is important, because the retweeter has nothing of value to add but wants to stay in the conversation or for popularity. Perhaps a solution for the algorithm would be to take account of retweeting in context of overall tweeting.
how about measuring it on the number of clicks a tweet gets – you could measure this by tweeting via hellotxt – the reach of tweets goes beyond the tweet platform when friendfeed and others pick up activity
- so if someone clicks on a tweet picked up via friendfeed /profilactic etc. via a widget placed on a wordpress or blogger blog – the click will be tracked if done via hellotxt – actually maybe twitter just need a stats gadget ?
RE: reweet – I use twitter this way – a flow of tweets meets me in the morning when I go to the twitter site (to check for any @replies or direct messages)
I will look at the tweets on my profile page that happen to be there and reply / comment back on a few like i do on facebook status updates – separate threads of conversations can appear on different networks.
Don’t think I’ve ever used retweet – maybe there is a button for it or maybe I’m thinking of blip.fm that does this ?
- I will manually add an @ sign in the box but would need more motivation to bother retweeting anything, I prefer to click on a hyperlink supplied in the tweet then delicious a webpage or blog that that I’ve been altered to via the tweet.
Having to manually type RT is a bit too techie for some I expect and techie is uncool and geeky unless you are interested in gadgets and new things – twitter could replace text messaging once the average Joe in the street ‘gets it’
- I imagine phone companies might get it if they can charge a bit more for the service – then they will dilute it into the mainstream via the highstreet phone shops – until then it’s another IM service – until Microsoft or someone buys it and it gets in PCworld instead in a box.
BTW I wouldn’t want my family on twitter as it would be like someone sat next to me asking questions about every tweet I make – or telling me how their bowels are playing up. err no thanks – I get that story when I have to see you…
Interesting ideas … without further analysis, it’s difficult to say whether this would improve search relevance and findability. An analysis of correlations between # of followers and retweets would be helpful. My guess is you’ll find that # of retweets is correlated with and even dependent on # of followers – and therefore this approach would encounter the same fundamental problems as filtering on # of followers without considering other factors in ranking. Another way of saying this is that retweets are in part an epiphenomenon, reflective of followership and not a freestanding entity.
Lastly, I would think extending the “favorites” function would work much better than retweets, since it doesn’t recreate the same message and thus add more noise to the search ranking algs.
I’m tracking the URLs that people cite, rather than explicit retweets, and getting much more information about who tracks what and when. Each person who creates a new “shrunken” URL effectively identifies a chain of retweeting, even if it isn’t an explicit retweet.
There are a bunch of posts about this on my blog at nickarnett.net.