Editor’s note: This is a guest post by David Sacks, the Founder and CEO of Yammer and Geni. Previously he was the COO of PayPal and produced the Academy Award-nominated movie “Thank You For Smoking.” Sacks says he’s incorporating the retweet feature into Yammer, his “Twitter for the enterprise” product that launched at TechCrunch50 last year. Sacks’ Twitter username is @DavidSacks
While there are many new features that Twitter could launch, the most powerful are likely to be based on behaviors that users have invented themselves.
That’s exactly what happened with @replies. Users started addressing each other by their @usernames. Twitter noticed and officially supported the feature. As a result, Twitter is on its way to becoming the discussion board for the web.
There is one other user convention with that kind of potential: Retweet.
A retweet occurs when a user reposts an interesting tweet. As with @replies, users established the notation organically: you type ‘RT’ followed by the @username of the original author and then the message.
The problem is friction. You have to copy & paste the message and then the author’s username. Frequently you have to edit the original message because the extra meta-data pushes it over 140 characters. Because of the accumulation of meta-data, retweets are even harder to retweet. This means that interesting messages don’t spread more than a generation or two.
Retweet support built into clients like Tweetdeck is only a partial solution. It eliminates the need to copy & paste messages but not to edit the original.
Twitter should officially support this feature by adding a ‘RT’ option to messages. Clicking this button would repost the original message in your followers’ feeds. The reposted message would appear just as you saw it (except for a tagline showing who retweeted it), and could itself be retweeted. (See my ‘Before’ and ‘After’ screenshot.)
The ability to retweet retweets is critical because it means that messages could spread throughout the twittersphere frictionlessly. I believe this would make Twitter the leading way that memes spread in our culture.
Twitter could accelerate this phenomenon by surfacing analytics about the most retweeted messages, allowing users to see the ideas (and links) that are spreading fastest throughout the world or in their local networks.
One other suggestion: A follow button appearing under the original author’s avatar in a retweet would make it easy to follow that person. Thus retweet would ensure widespread distribution not just of interesting content but also of interesting people. This would help level the “celebrity” bias on Twitter, allowing regular people to quickly build a following by posting interesting messages. In the absence of such a feature, many people conclude that it’s too hard to get discovered if you’re not a celebrity.
Like search and @replies, retweet plays to Twitter’s core strengths — discoverability and easy sharing. In the war between sharing platforms, it’s hard to see how Facebook could copy this feature, because its privacy settings would prevent the frictionless spread of content.
If Twitter becomes the dominant platform for discovering and sharing information when privacy is not important (including most status updates and all links), Facebook might suddenly look like a small subset of the sharing universe, reserved primarily for private news and media sharing.
I like your suggestion because then you see the original twitterer’s profile. I’d try to find a way to make the re-Twitter-er (ouch) more visible otherwise some people might be surprised.
If you want retweets keep your tweets SHORT, PUNCHY, and RELEVANT!!
Any one that RT often should make sure she take the ‘major’ part of the original tweet and repeat it with the source user name. Simple, no? guess what… lots of people can’t follow this.
How can one natter on in 140 characters? Don’t be ridiculous.
I agree with you! It would be nice if Twitter supports this a little bit more…
This should be sent as a mail to Ev and the folks at Twitter…
Grrr! another twitter story!
The twitter obsession is nothing short of rediculous, total waste of time.
When I perform job interviews I inquire about their twitter acount, if they have one then they are removed from consideration. If you use twitter, you are a waste of time.
And you are just showing your negative qualities. Do you also ask them what TV shows they watch? Active, intelligent and energetic people try out new forms of information sharing. Why would you consider that a bad thing? Are you looking for dull people that have no imagination at all?
So Loop, if you were looking to fill a job and Barack Obama walked in you would remove him from consideration because he had a Twitter account?
LOL! I wd do that to facebookers!
So the reason why they wont go over the 140 character limit is..
up to 20 characters for username
up to 140 characters for post
Mobile phone average maximum # of characters per single message is 160. I saw it in a video of thats why the reasoning behind it. You techie’s prob already know it. Squeezing in the RT would just mess up their format already.
Nice suggestion. Re-tweeted the article
I think this is an excellent comment. By including the re-tweet as a meta option, it would allow Twitter to accurately report how often a specific tweet had been re-tweeted. I would also like to see the RT count under a tweet.
I prefer that it take a little manual work – it cuts down on people mindlessly propagating a mediocre status. If it’s good enough to retweet, it should be good enough to spend three seconds to do so.
Every tweet is by default sub mediocre.
This is a great idea.
Something important that wasn’t addressed in the article, though, is how best to represent the amount of retweets a tweet gets in Twitter’s search results. Supposing the #retweetButton works as described above, search results would either be full of identical tweets from the same person, or just their original tweet without the present cluster of retweets from other users. Neither way represents the state of affairs very well. Some representation needs to be given that communicates the retweet relevance of a post in the results. The best thing I can think of is size: enlarging a tweet based on the number of retweets it gets (just like tag clouds) would be a quick, intuitive way to read popularity in results.
i like your idea!
+1 SHORT, PUNCHY and RELEVANT!
RT is a mechanism for extending reach of relevant memes, and I agree with the article, with the proviso that people use “via” as an alternative, when they want to actually add something to the transaction.
RT is also a semantic relationship between two entities, more often than not substantiated by a link. It carries the connotation “A agrees with B about _____.” This sort of semantic data could be very useful.
My twitter does have a RT function – a link under the reply icon. Is this some side benefit of a Firefox add-on I’m using? I actually thought twitter had caught on…
I think that that’s PowerTwitter…
Anyway, the article’s idea is good, but what about when I want to RT someone + my own note?
ah twitcrunch rocks
thank GOD we have twitcrunch, otherwise I couldn’t get my daily twitter fix
I thought it was time for an iphone post? Or is it iphone, facebook, THEN twitter. I can’t remember.
So funny! Srsly laughing.
Great ideas! I think the Twitter should definitely implement these… I do have a facebook account but was never hooked into it… but twitter is short, sweet and simple!
“Discussion Board of the Web” is a very low blow indeed. Why? Because it is among the most difficult traffic on all the web to monetize. Way to sabotage your competition, Dave!
A great idea for sure, but I think the implementation would have to make the RT more obvious than the italicized grey text below the tweet.
eh they’ll be out of the limelight soon enough
I like this idea.
It should be as hard as physically possible to recreate the concept of forwarding in twitter as possible. Why the hell would I follow someone who mostly retweets? I’ll follow whomever is being retweeted, since they’re clearly more interesting.
In short, do. not. want.
> Why the hell would I follow someone who
> mostly retweets?
Then unfollow them.
Well, of course I’d unfollow them, assuming I followed them to begin with. I just don’t think it should be easier to parrot other people.
Pud, are you a two account guy?
Someone who makes sense, I unfollow anyone who RT’s more then once or twice a day. If I wanted other peoples tweets then I would be following them.
The same goes for people who only tweet famous quotes.
like this and retweeted it, tweetdeck makes it easy, twitterfox makes it hard, firefox makes it doable, twitter should take notice, agree. potential killer app
On the flip side, all that extra effort required to make a Retweet means that Retweets frequently are higher quality tweets. You make it easier, and then “impulse” Retweets will go up and so will the noise to signal ratio.
Its all fine and dandy until RTs start to get spammed the way that @address messages are now starting to be used to spam.
– MV
I really like having the option when doing ReTweets. What’s great about Tweetie is that you have the option to do either “RT” or (via @). It’s really useful.
Nice idea.
I would also like to see which of my following retweeted the message of course.
My opinion is the less retweets the better. Retweeting is simply aggregating tweets, without offering anything original.
Great idea – I like it
Great post! I agree RT’s are great but more integration could be added. I think them enough to do it all day even if I have to edit posts. But obviously it would increase the spread of things if it was simple for everyone to get on board.
thanks for mentioning the RT in twitter web pages, I have been wondering if they will add RT there for a while. Hoping they see this post and do.
Here is an idea, ok? Get a business model! I know. Revolutionary idea. Such is the word of Sanjay.
The RT is an unusual phenomenon. I see that lots of folks simply tweet the same story, link, etc without the RT. I don’t have any real issue with that, but as a method of determining who is a real source of information rather than just a spammer, the RT is essentially a pedigree builder. I would love for this to be an “official” twitter thing…it simply allows more folks to identify those who start and maintain conversations, rather than giving credit where it is NOT due…
This is a bad idea in my opinion. Allowing easier RT is a recipe for wide-spread spam of not-so-good twits.
By raising the effort, Twitter makes sure users RT only what is really important to them. I am sure if Twitter includes a button “Retweet”, I will start seeing countless RTs and many users would only retweet, instead of contributing with original twits.
i agree with this observation (wondered myself quite frequently over the past year or so)… however, also wonder if Twitter isn’t intentionally not including RT’s so as to leave some exploration opportunity to 3rd-party market?
(i know sounds a little conspiratorial… a simpler solution might be that they overlooked this, but i find that hard to believe)
surely there must be some reason they haven’t made RT simpler/easier native functionality…
Why hasn’t Twitter partnered with TinyURL or some other URL shortener to place a “TinyURL it” button/ text field in their sidebar. How easy would that be for folks to shorten URL’s?
You’d think that would be on the top of the list for some bizdev folks to get out of the way.
These are some really great ideas. As simple as Twitter is, these ideas would make it even simpler.
It would be so easier to "like" it.
A retweet is essentially a hack of the "like" functionality. I recently shutdown my retweet indexing service because I feel FriendFeed really solves the issue completely.
This probably doesn’t need to be solved with a UI change twitter.com based upon the fact that users who prolifically RT have undoubtedly graduated from the web interfact onto clients like tweetdeck. They’ve always won by offloading niche functionality needs for powerusers onto developers via the API.
Additionally, the solution described above doesn’t really address attribution in a way that would make this subset of the twitter population happy, as far as I can tell from RT behavior I’ve observed.
For example, who gets credit on an RT of an RT? People solve this in different ways right now, some favoring the original source, others favoring the source from their own network as a filter for content from that originator, some attribute as many as will fit.
This solution also causes problems at the device-update level. Do I start getting RT passed through to my phone delivered the original source now too (whom I don’t even follow let alone enabled device update for)? That seems confusing without adding the attribution which won’t fit in a single sms.
Sure, all of these things could be solved with the introduction of a few more user settings, but confusing the majority with more options to solve the “problem” of it being marginally difficult it is to post redundant content seems contrary to the goals of twitter.
Blake, I completely disagree – a like is just a vote, for which a user has no risk giving out – a retweet is in their stream, if you retweet constantly your followers will unfollow you. Plus a retweet has context, you can add ‘what’ you like about it.
I agree that making ‘retweeting’ easier is important, and even having it part of the dataset would help. But plenty have said that they should ‘copy’ friendfeed with the ‘ease’ of the like. I believe this is a dangerous move, currently a RT is something that a user must choose to do knowing that it is part of their stream, and that if they RT too much, or RT poor content then they potentially will lose followers.
Secondly a RT must result in a tweet because it is important to allow ‘context’ around retweeting.
Nick, you’re right about the in/out-stream but I completely disagree with your "just a vote". I get all my friends’ likes in my home feed (as I get all my friends RT in my Twitter): but I can decide to get only original entries by hiding FoaF. Likes are much more powerful than retweet, because I have all the context with the comments of the original entry. I don’t have to re-explain the all conversation. Also because it helps everyone to find content (a like is a RT and a vote, it’s easy to search for entries that have more than 10 likes… can’t do that in Twitter). Also, it’s just so easier to click than to copy-past, add the author and send.
"Share" is what you need for in-stream re-post. But if you accept RT in Twitter, you’ll accept FoaF entries in Friendfeed, so who needs to "share"? Like is just 10x more powerful than RT.
I disagree with the suggested format, showing the profile of the original tweeter instead of the re-tweeter. Seeing the identity of the re-tweeter is, to me, an indication of an authoritative source. If I see that Tim O’Reilly is RT’ing someone, I’m more likely to take a look at that user’s profile and tweets, compared to some random acquaintance RT’ing something.
Sites like http://dailyrt.com are great for seeing the most retweeted tweets.
i could see that many blogs’ alexa rank has gone way too high – is that due to retweets ?probably yes !
Please spare us the RT avalanche! Retweets are lazy tweets regardless who sends them! RT is becoming synonymous with spam and search engine optimization. Don’t make re-tweeting easier, make it even more difficult.
On the other hand i fully endorse a possible ‘Like’ functionality.
Twitter provides a great means for distributing vast amounts of information to large audiences with minimal effort (this includes the power of the RT). The missing component for me is how does someone effectively keep track of or database the useful information they come across on Twitter? It’s great if you find something useful, but if you can’t store it or do anything with that information how good is it to you?
Great ideas, and fascinating comments — good points all. I, personally, like to know who is doing the retweeting — it tells me something about them.
In the science community retweeting has been great for spreading influence and knowledge because so many papers get published via the some ole channels.
Brilliant. One of those smack your head, why didn’t I think of that ideas. Hope that Twitter AND all third party Twitter clients add this feature. Sure spamming could become an issue, but selective following should resolve that issue.
Good Idea. Would like to see it incorporated in the UI preferably in the same area as the ‘reply’ and ‘favorite’ icons. There should also be retweet functionality added to the api, of course this would just be a wrapper to the posting already but still a nice addition.
I like this idea. RT = future
Nice idea, but it better be an option. I miss the option to be able to turn off @replies. Too much stuff crowding the tweet stream is making Twitter not as fun. Thankfully I have greasemonkey scripts to hide retweets and blip.fm now, that shit is super-annoying.