Twitter is making some fun changes.
I blogged last week about the connection made to linkedin – which I love. This week they’ve launched automatic retweets which I don’t love so much.
It is a functionality that has grown out of the twitterverse, where the initials “RT” stand for “Re Tweet” and was used to show that you were repeating someone else’s tweet, so in that sense it’s great.
A Retweet has it's own icon, and identifies who retweeted it below the tweet
Retweets now shoe the avatar of the original tweeter, which I think is good – it helps me discover new people to follow. Although it did confuse me a bit to start with.
What I don’t like is that when I retweet I don’t get the chance to comment, sometimes I like to indicate why I think it’s interesting for others to read. (I can get around this by retweeting the old-fashioned way)
The other thing I don’t like is that retweets are now only visible to my followers – not to the whole world. Yes I do realise the whole world is not interested, but it does change the dynamic of interaction a bit.
Twitter has also changed the question you answer, last week we were asked “What are you doing?” and now we’re asked “What’s happening?”. There have been some mutterings about this change, but in my view it’s a more realistic question for what most of the tweets do answer. Or, put another way, I didn’t notice the change until someone told me.
It looks like twitter is picking up pace on the development now that the site is stable and we’re seeing fewer “fail whales”. What’s next?
