There has been a lot of chatter about Twitter’s new Retweet (RT) functionality of late, pretty much all of it negative. The complaints range from it looks weird in the website, to it destroying the ability to add little chats along with tweets when forwarding, to even saying that it’s a huge hassle for clients to implement. While I agree with the end message (the new RT functionality is not good), I’m convinced that all of these complaints are fundamentally wrong.
The real problem with the new Twitter retweet functionality is that it destroys the chain of trust. The point of the retweet is that somebody whom I find interesting found something else interesting and wants to share that info, all the while crediting the original author.
One of the reasons I have a list of people I follow is that I’ve come to respect them for the information they share and send around with Twitter. I don’t know who @joeblow12345abc is, but when @my_bff_forever forwards an article that just so happens to have originally been sent by the former, I’ll probably read it.
So, the problem with Twitter now is that when I got to the website, I see a tweet from @joeblow12345abc on my home page. I don’t know this person, and I sit for a few seconds wondering what on earth he’s doing in my tweet list. It’s only after looking at the bottom of the tweet in tiny letters do I see that it’s been forwarded by somebody I am following. It goes against the whole point of Twitter. The community has done a good job of setting up the standards for tweet formats thus far — probably best to let them continue.
