We all are aware of the Retweet button that is supposed to show up on Twitter soon. Doug Bowman, ex-Google lead designer and now working at Twitter, gave some insight into Twitter’s plans on this. He was answering questions at the GigaOm Bunker Series and one of the questioner asked about the delay in putting the Retweet button on. Doug explained that they are waiting to find a way to make sure that the retweets are legitimate (the person who is attributed to the tweet is the one who tweeted it originally) and they are not modified from the original tweet.
Though it is not a problem at this point, it has the potential to blow up soon, especially with more and more celebrities jumping into Twitter. Plus, the 140 character limitation forces people who retweet to modify the original tweet. The trimming could change the context altogether and create all sort of problems for the twitterers and, also, to the company in the form of lawsuits. In order to overcome this, the retweet button will verify the person who tweeted it in the first instance and it will also not allow any modifications. The retweets will be verified. I think it is a good idea and I appreciate Twitter for not rushing into implementing a retweet button that blows up on their face.
I’m really not sure the “verified retweet” means all that much now. First off – all the major “twitter management” platforms have RT buttons built in and just putting an RT and a @username will qualify anything as a Retweet and it always has.
I agree that might be a problem sometimes – and there has been spam generated using that gambit but it is a part of the platform and culture at this point. I can only see two ways this can work > you verify all RT tags (impractical overhead it would seem) or you only verify RT tags for those with verified accounts (perhaps but because of the 140 character restriction this is prohibitive too if you include the [email protected] in the count).
Honestly I and others use the RT tag for atttribution sometiimes too when we know the username of the person, have a link to something on their blog but don’t have an easy way to find a tweet that they put up themselves that says what you want to say about the article.
Lots of cases where this isn’t going to work well or at all.
Yeah, I wish there was a re-tweet button, but that’s it. Once you add the RT @username to an already long tweet you’ve got to do some editing to get it down to 140 chars!