By the by - Rael said that they've pulled back the deployment of this feature redesign. Apparently there were some technical difficulties. So retweet design is on hold for the time being. Hopefully while they figure out the backend issues, they can also rethink the design strategy. Sharon Greenfield Digital Ethnographer @SharonG On Nov 11, 2009, at 7:58 PM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:
Thanks for sending this fabulous paper, danah -
Danah + colleagues' paper provides lots of really good examples that underscore the socio-cultural complexities of retweeting - and to the point here, specifically what will be lost in Twitter's own redesign of the RT syntax. Twitters redesigned syntax -- Described here -- http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html
--drops the identity of the sender of the RT as a communicative agent out of the RT message. This break in the social economy of Twitter's crowd sourcing network eliminates the additional information provided by the linkage between the author-A- of the tweet that gets retweeted by Sender-B - and that information, in the case of my own use of Twitter, is specifically and importantly part of the reputational economy that tells me fairly reliably - Sender B provides very reliable information about blogs and consumer health info - for example - therefore, I will likely want to take 5 seconds and click on this URL. If I don't know author-A - and this is how the retweet will show up in Twitter's new design -- as a message from someone I don't actually follow - the likelihood that I will look at the URL is close to zero. Much <intelligence> is lost in this redesign.
Mary
From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:15:44 -0500 To: Mary Bryson <mary.bryson@ubc.ca> Cc: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twitter Re-Design
I share your disappointment. Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan, and I investigated retweeting practices in the spring and summer and found a whole plethora of different practices that are not supported by this implementation. We wrote this up in a HICSS paper that will be published and presented in January, but we've made a draft version available for those who want to know more about retweeting:
Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter danah boyd, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan HICSS 2010 http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf
Enjoy!
danah
On Nov 11, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:
RE: Why Retweet works the way it does
http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html <BY: Evan Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, of which he is currently CEO.>
I think it's interesting that Ev <creator of Twitter> misses the most valued function of the retweet <to this user>, which is the linkage between the retweeter and the original author of the RT tweet - the creator of Twitter's new modification of retweet removes the citation factor - The current Twitter syntax of say, Richard Smith retweeting something about surveillance and blogging makes me follow a link about say, blogging, precisely because Richard Smith is citing it. For the URL simply to appear in my InBox from ZX would be meaningless. This is a good example of where a tool designer fails to talk to users about what is good about the actual design and what would then, be lost in the supposed "improvement".
Mary -- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Professor and Director, Network of Centers and Institutes in Education (NCIE) & Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry (CCFI), Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia Archive: http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson
CCFI: Innovation Works Here http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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"taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ @zephoria
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