Reply to ReTweets—Is Twitter Breaking Community Features

Following numer­ous reac­tions to Twitter’s announce­ment of offi­cial­ly mak­ing retweets a part of the Twitter sys­tem, but not retweets as we know them, my friend A.J. Wood post­ed to his blog a well thought out analy­sis of the retweet sys­tem might mean for users. In reply, I offer the below.

I had faith in Twitter’s peo­ple to make the com­mu­ni­ty better–or at least to have their own (even­tu­al) bot­tom line in mind–until they screwed up @ replies. Now, like many oth­ers, I miss out on so many inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions and peo­ple I would fol­low sim­ply because I can’t see con­ver­sa­tions if I don’t already know and fol­low every­one involved.

Given what you and I do on Twitter, shar­ing and retweet­ing infor­ma­tion and great links with the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ty, the pro­posed new retweet­ing for­mat will almost cer­tain­ly kneecap such usage and make Twitter a much less friend­ly, much less infor­ma­tive place.

If Biz Stone and his cohorts keep going the way they are, all the strengths that make Twitter great will be nul­li­fied before long.

I find myself wish­ing that all the Twitter com­peti­tors had­n’t gone under. We might need them tomorrow.