Twitter Temporarily Deactivated Retweet Feature
Looks like Twitter is in midst of utter chaos. Just a week back Twitter rolled out a new feature: Retweet, for small percentage of accounts, to share tweets. But yesterday Retweet button is been missing in home page. Retweet is not a new thing for Twitter users as most of them either Retweet manually or use apps and tools. For Twitter users Retweet is not just a feature to forward interesting messages but became a way to create online buzz within no time.
I am one of those Beta users got access to use RT button.
This is what to say on disabling the Retweet feature from Twitter team:
“We’re working on a few problems related to the ongoing rollout. These should be resolved quickly and it will be back on for those who had the Retweet feature previously. And we’ll then continue the incremental rollout of this feature to everyone.”
Meanwhile, there were mixed feelings across Tweetosphere on functionality of RT button. With this new feature, one cannot have the privilege to edit the retweets and more over there is an element of distraction as unknown avatars of people can be seen though users don’t follow in their timeline.
Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, defended the functionality of Retweet in his lengthy blog post,
“There’s a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet (more on that below). The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they’re built natively into the system, they’re trackable. And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.
In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath.
The drawback is that it may be a little surprising (unpleasant even, for some) to discover avatars of people they don’t follow in their timeline. I ask those people to keep in mind the following: You’re already reading the content from these people via organic retweets. This is just giving you more context.”
Hey Tweeples, do you like these functionalities? Are you comfortable tweeting and retweeting through apps and tools rather than manually?Time to discuss.
About the author: Lohith Amruthappa is a Search Engine Marketing specialist and blogger, currently managing inhouse SEO and PPC projects. You can visit for more information on SEO, PPC and Google analytics at http://www.lohithamruthappa.com
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The whole USP of twitter so far has been the simplicity of the usage. It is very restrictive in lot of ways like 140 chars limit, no inherent support for sharing links, images and videos. But this restriction is precisely what has led to its widespread adoption. People found their own ways to retweet, link shortening services evolved, images sharing sites evolved around this ecosystem with no native support by twitter. Hence over time we have known to use a particular feature in certain way.
But now for twitter to bring inherent support in twitter for retweets is going to be disruptive from usability perspective. People will not like it to start with. But over time I guess they will start using it.
In my view Twitter should focus on bringing a fundamentally new feature rather than just providing a native support for existing features.