[Air-L] Twitter Re-Design

live human.factor.one at gmail.com
Wed Nov 11 20:34:34 PST 2009


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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>>
>> ------
>>
>> "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani
>> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
>> http://www.danah.org/
>> @zephoria
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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