{"id":1684,"date":"2009-10-31T00:12:37","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T04:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=1684"},"modified":"2009-10-30T22:14:42","modified_gmt":"2009-10-31T02:14:42","slug":"twitter-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/10\/31\/twitter-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first heard of Twitter, I didn’t get it. The benefits were not clear, and the drawbacks — following everyone else’s dinner menus, lunch dates, appointments, and daily routine — seemed like a minor purgatory for me.<\/p>\n

At the last company I was working for as a full-time employee, it was mandated that managers join Twitter and (at a minimum) follow the other managers\/team leads. After a few weeks, I branched out from the mandate and started following other, non-work related, Twitterers. It’s been a great source of potential blogging material, providing me with useful and interesting links. 140 characters doesn’t seem so limiting, now that I’ve discovered how useful even that short a string can be.<\/p>\n

What Wired<\/em> characterizes as “mob rule<\/a>” is actually a very useful service. I now wonder how I managed to find blogworthy material without it.<\/p>\n

\n

Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world\u2019s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else\u2019s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for \u201cretweet,\u201d and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.<\/p>\n

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn\u2019t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company\u2019s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them \u201ca great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.\u201d The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site\u2019s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn\u2019t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with . . . Twitter. A self-described \u201csocial, search, and viral marketing scientist\u201d named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur<\/em>, writing that Twitter was about to \u201ccompletely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.\u201d That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter\u2019s uncompromising brevity: \u201cVery bad plan we hates it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first heard of Twitter, I didn’t get it. The benefits were not clear, and the drawbacks — following everyone else’s dinner menus, lunch dates, appointments, and daily routine — seemed like a minor purgatory for me. At the last company I was working for as a full-time employee, it was mandated that managers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[369,58,310],"class_list":["post-1684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-interesting","tag-internet","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ra","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1684"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}