[Air-L] Twitter Re-Design

Wed Nov 11 20:41:47 PST 2009

The blog that I was quoting from concerning the redesign, was published
yesterday, and is written by Evan Williams,  CEO of Twitter, announcing
that:
This week on Twitter, we're rolling a feature we've been working on for a
while out to a lot more users. (If you don't have it yet, you will soon.)
That feature is our native version of Retweet, which Biz posted
<http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/project-retweet-phase-one.html>  about on
the Twitter blog a couple months ago.

http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html

Seems like a done deal.

Cheers,

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/

> From: live <human.factor.one at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:34:34 -0800
> To: Mary Bryson <mary.bryson at ubc.ca>
> Cc: danah boyd <aoir.z3z at danah.org>, <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twitter Re-Design
> 
> 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 at danah.org>
>>> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:15:44 -0500
>>> To: Mary Bryson <mary.bryson at ubc.ca>
>>> Cc: <air-l at 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/
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://www.aoir.org/
>>> 
>>> ------
>>> 
>>> "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani
>>> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
>>> http://www.danah.org/
>>> @zephoria
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 