DJ Meph (dot) Net

A lot has happened since my recent blog posting about Twitter’s failed attempt at adding native support for re-tweets. My rabble-rousing may or may not have had any effect on the outcome, but I’m extremely happy with it nonetheless.

First, it should be noted that another controversy was stirred up on Twitter when it was found that Twitter was blocking native re-tweets in searches from Twitter’s home page. This was a non-issue for me because Twitter left their search page (search.twitter.com) and their API search alone, giving people the choice to use the method they prefer. Although a little more transparency would have benefited Twitter greatly, I still commend them for experimenting with their service without forcing the changes on users. This is how social media gets better.

I’d also like to address the growing concerns over Facebook’s privacy policies. I guess I am just of the old-school thought that privacy on the internet just doesn’t exist. Sites get hacked into all the time, and “private information” gets stolen, regardless of any given company’s privacy policies. This is why I don’t post anything to the social web that I consider private. That being said, Facebook’s handling of the situation leaves something to be desired. The bottom line is that Facebook is proving that they value profits over value, which is a terrible revenue model. Here’s a hint, Facebook. Your users are what give your network value. Take them out of the picture and the value disappears. If Facebook doesn’t start listening to their users, they could face a number of consequences, quite possibly a massive exodus.

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This is good news for the Twitterati, who have grown accustomed to a social network that has derived value from personal investment. Twitter users are never shy to voice their opinion, and the good people at Twitter are always willing to answer. Within a week, they have managed to address two major outcries from members.

I was pleased to see that a new version of TweetDeck was released, which included a major overhaul to the application’s interface and support for native re-tweets in the Mentions column. I am to understand that Seesmic desktop has this now as well. On Tweetdeck’s changelog, it says that support for native re-tweets in the mentions column was added, so I’m assuming that this was a change that Twitter made to their API. You still can’t see them in the mentions column on twitter’s web interface, but I’m OK with that, because there is a section of the site dedicated to it.

Twitter also addressed the issue of filtering re-tweets in their search function. They explained that they were expirmenting with methods for eliminating duplicate tweets in searches. As I mentioned earlier, I’m good with this as long as they continue to offer us the choice to do it the old way through search.twitter.com and the API. The only change I would like to see is increased transparency on Twitter’s part in the future. Don’t wait until after you implement a change to explain it to everyone.

Every company makes mistakes. The Internet is enabling companies to reach out to even more people in an interactive way and along with that comes the responsibility of increased transparency and the possibility for more epic failure. Twitter has their finger on the collective pulse of their community, in ways that we haven’t seen before, even from other companies with web-based services. Twitter deserves their props for simply getting it. They are true pioneers of the digital age.

It feels really good to write a positive post for once. Too much negativity really starts to wear me down over time.