DJ Meph (dot) Net

I came to a startling revelation today about Twitter. I noticed that people have been re-tweeting me for a long time without me noticing. I dug around a little bit to see what was going on, and I’m absolutely livid that Twitter has dropped the proverbial ball so badly.

For those of you who joined Twitter in the last six months, re-tweeting was not always a native feature in Twitter. Up until November of 2009, re-tweeting was commonly done by merely copying someone’s tweet and putting “RT @username: ” in front of it. It was a great way to show support for tweets that you like. It was also a great way of spreading information. Re-tweets often went viral and became a huge part of the Twitter community.

The biggest problem with re-tweeting was the 140 character limit. If you wanted to re-tweet someone who used all of their 140 characters, you would have to somehow shorten the tweet to make it fit. Re-tweeting became a feature on both twitter.com and 3rd-party clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I remember a time when TweetDeck even had a feature that would attempt to shorten tweets by replacing words with shorter, phonetically-spelled words and acronyms. It was a hassle, but we dealt with it, and for the most part there were no complaints because the feature was never native to begin with.

Native Re-Tweet of an Old-School Re-tweet in Twitter

In Novemeber of 2009, Twitter announced the native re-tweet feature, and promised it would end all war and oppression on the planet Earth. A native re-tweet preserves the complete, original tweet, shows the usernames of both the author and the re-tweeter, and uses a goofy icon to show that it’s a re-tweet.

Personally, I like the design of the feature and applaud Twitter’s recognition of user demands. However, Twitter fucked up majorly on the implementation of the feature, and still has yet to offer full support for it. Old school re-tweets always showed up in your @mentions feed as long as your twitter name was attributed to it. Native re-tweets show up in two places: your main feed and a hidden place on the twitter web site. To get there, you have to go to your home page on Twitter, click on “Retweets” in the right-hand column, then click “Your Tweets, Retweeted” in the tabs at the top of the feed. Another way to access this page is to simply use the link: http://twitter.com/#retweeted_of_mine.

Not only is this feature buried inside of the Twitter web site, but as of yet there is very little API support for it. There is currently no consistent method for developers to use to show native re-tweets through their respective Twitter applications. The only method I can think of that developers could use to show native re-tweets is to go around the API and use a PERL script to feed them into a client. For obvious reasons, this is not an acceptable method, but certainly a method that would work better than Twitter’s. (or lack thereof) Native re-tweets aren’t even shown in lists, which for many of us is a great way to sort through the massive amount of tweets that come through our feed.

The main problem I have with this is that Twitter was obviously unprepared to support this feature upon implementation. Had they waited a month or two to include API support, that would be fine. It took a little while for the feature to catch on anyway, and we have all experienced the growing pains of a very fast-moving enterprise. The fact of the matter is that many people still don’t use the feature. It’s not because they don’t like it, but because they know that it’s unlikely to be seen… by anyone. I use TweetDeck on my PC laptop and Twee on my Palm Pre to organize my Twitter experience. At any given time I rarely see more than five tweets at a time in my main feed, which as of now, is the only place I am able to see native re-tweets. I have two lists of tweeters called “favs” and “hip hop” that I use to keep up to date with people I interact with daily, but none of their native re-tweets show up in my timeline. The probability of me seeing any native re-tweets is staggeringly low, whereas old school re-tweets show up in all of my feeds and I see them all the time. I see old school re-tweets of my own tweets instantly, and they pop up in my notifications, whereas I have to go to my web browser to see native re-tweets.

One of the underlying issues here is the fact that there are many people out there who don’t know about this shortcoming. Many people out there are using the native re-tweet feature, assuming that it’s a supported feature. Little do they know that very few people are actually seeing their re-tweets, and in some cases, they might even be getting frustrated at the perceptive lack of response they are getting on Twitter. The same applies to those who don’t know how to view native re-tweets. This is where my personal experience is relevant. I didn’t know until this morning about the hidden page on Twitter that shows where people have used the native feature to re-tweet me. It has been six months since this feature was implemented, and i’m just now realizing that I am getting a much bigger response to my tweets than I previously thought.

Native re-tweets are a feature of comfort, not of necessity. While the old way had its limitations, there was no sense of urgency for Twitter to implement this feature. Twitter could have waited until they were able to support the feature before they implemented it, and no one would have been worse off for it. Twitter decided to implement the feature prematurely, and now we are worse off because of it. I realize that sometimes these things take time, but it has been far too long. I believe that Facebook has implemented a few major layout and feature changes in the span of time since the native re-tweet feature was implemented. There’s just no excuse at this point.

Here’s my idea. Eighty-six the damned feature until you can implement it right! Just get rid of it. I don’t care if we don’t see native re-tweets again until 2016! Just do it right! I am a big supporter of Twitter and I have personally experienced the impact social networking has on our lives. When I see an issue like this, it tells me that Twitter either doesn’t care, or they are too inept to fix it. I have always enjoyed the simplicity of Twitter’s social network. There is not now, and has never been, a need for carelessly implemented features. The time for pontification is over, and the time for action is long past due. Get it together, Twitter. Your users have spoken.