RT: Project Re-tweet is kind of lame

When I look back at all of the posts I have written recently, across various blogging sites (including this one), one theme is clear – I love to hate on Twitter. Here I’m at it again with reaction to Project Retweet – a half baked attempt at turning an already flawed process into standard functionality in Twitter’s UI.

Lets get one thing out of the way from the outset. Just because I think retweets (much like hashtags) are more or less workarounds for the failings of Twitter as a communication tool, that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. One of my most popular posts on Examiner, the 5 reasons Facebook is better for marketing than Twitter, benefited greatly from retweeting. In an evening, the viral spread of the link to that post, almost entirely through RT’s amassed me over 1,000 views. Not bad when you think about it, really.

But the reason retweets came into existence in the first place was because Twitter users got frustrated with not being able to share the tweets they found with their friends. Unlike Facebook, favorites are buried on Twitter. You could look at a users “favorited” tweets but let’s face it, no one does.

Again, same thing with hashtags. People started to use the hash symbol in conjunction with keywords or abbreviations (#sxsw for example denotes South by South West) in order to provide a more efficient way of searching for related conversion on Twitter.

There have even been businesses form around the concept of retweets. TweetMeme and ReTweet.com are just 2 services which track the most popular conversations on Twitter based upon the number of RTs they get. You can even get into the act by clicking on the retweet button accompanying each post on this site.

Project Retweet

Project Retweet was announced today Twitter as an official way to deal with retweeting. Essentially, the ability to re-tweet a tweet on your timeline will be included in the standard Twitter web UI as well as through API calls that third party developers can take advantage of.

Mashable wrote a great post about how these changes will affect what people have come to know about retweeting. Now, it will be possible to see messages from people you don’t follow in your twitter feed – something I am not looking forward to as I have recently pruned about 800 people from my followed list.

I feel for the company’s which developed their own tools to facilitate this non-standard way of sharing tweets. However, I really feel bad for Twitter in that they feel forced to engineer hack workarounds to obvious flaws in their product. These do not feel like well though out changes.