Feb
26
2010
Re-Tweeting
Author: LyleTwitter has introduced “re-tweeting”; an easier mechanism for sending someone else’s “tweet” from your account. In the past you would have had to copy & paste if someone else posted something of interest, which would have been tagged with your account if you didn’t fit in an attribution in your 140 characters.
Re-Tweet Snapshot
Not a bad idea; it’s nice to make sure the originator is mentioned, and its nice to give re-tweets a special status so you recognize them as a resend of someone else’s message. Unfortunately, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired.
As you can see in the example on the right, “LauraRubinchuk” was retweeted by “JoanElevatesRE”. The indication of a “re-tweet” is the little turnaround icon at the start of the post along with the “retweeted by” message at the end. What is nice is that this is differentiated from a cut & paste job, but it takes up more space and is more prominent than an original post. I would have preferred to see the account of the person I’m following so it’s easier to see why I’m seeing the post. Highlighting or a different color would also be nice to recognize the special status of a “re-tweeted” message. As it is, this looks a lot more like spam with all these accounts and faces I don’t know presented like accounts I’m following.
Even worse is the hovering “help” message bringing more attention to this unknown account and obliterating the posts below it. A box that isn’t working in my browser, cannot be removed, and sends me to a message that says I can’t block these re-tweets which I don’t want to see.
If I was a heavy Twitter user I might be more upset about this. However, I only casually use Twitter from time to time because I don’t see any advantage to it over more traditional blogging and RSS readers. I will say that the 140 character limit is a fun exercise to practice writing more concisely.
