Is Twitter opening a can of worms with the RT change?

Phil Sheard has written a post examining the impact to brands of the changes to retweets that Twitter is gradually introducing (there is no need for me to repeat what he says here as he puts it very eloquently).

I’m a big retweeter. And I use the ‘traditional’ RT for a variety of different reasons:

• To show my ‘support’ or agreement with a tweet/idea/post or cause
• To flag up interesting ideas/links to my followers
• To credit the original author (or RTer) of the tweet

As I’ve suggested in the comments on Phil’s post, I think Twitter may be about to experience some backlash with this change. And to my mind, much of this comes down to the ‘if it’s not broken…’ argument. Personally, I don’t see a problem with the system as it exists at the moment.

Perhaps I am just afflicted by that very human condition, whereby we automatically shy away from ‘change’ – the ‘Facebook effect’. When something (like a social network) that we have a close attachment to undergoes a change, our automatic inclination is to resist it.

There is precedent here. In May 2009, Twitter made a subtle change to the way replies show up in your Twitter stream. There was a huge backlash initially to the move, but this soon abated and today, we still quite happily use Twitter.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter will experience the same backlash with the RT change, as it will fly under the radar for many users.

But, I do think Twitter has to be careful.

I love the fact that Twitter is a very simple, open platform that allows users to communicate and interact in whatever way they please. Yes, there are certain ‘conventions’ that crop up, but these aren’t really imposed from on high, rather, they are moderated by the community as a whole.

This is in stark contrast to other networks like Facebook, where the way you use the service is dictated by the network itself.

Is Twitter potentially in danger of pushing its agenda too much on its users? Or is a bit of organisation and order important and useful as popularity in the network continues to grow and user numbers increase?

picture credit

Danny Whatmough