We’ve been watching this episode since yesterday. Some Twitter users were noticing that anything with RT in it wasn’t being seen in certain search functions. The community as a whole went into an uproar.
It seems that Twitter heard that message loud and clear. We contacted Twitter, and were just given this response via email:
“We’ve been experimenting with ways to identify duplicate content, and recently implemented an approach that identifies retweets as duplicates. This only applied for logged-in searches on www.twitter.com, not to searches on search.twitter.com, search APIs, or the logged-out homepage. However, this change has not had a positive impact on the user experience so we plan to revert it. Eliminating explicitly duplicative content from search results in a more intelligent way is something we plan to work on more in the long-term.”
It’s always great to see when a company listens to the user base, and even greater when they take an extended hand. The RT function is important to many of us, and Twitter sees that fact.
Kudos to you Brad and to The Next Web for covering this, and to Twitter for listening to its customers on this occasion.
Wonderful! May I go back to using “RT” rather than “TR?” ;-[)
Personally, I’d love it if my stream only showed the first one in my network to tweet an item. Maybe as the item gets retweeted they could just add the retweeters’ handles to the one post without each one seeming like a new post?
Would make it harder for retweeters to get publicity, but it would help us learn who the real thought leaders are.
You may be forgetting the most important aspects of RTs are not publicity, but to be social and especially amplification to extend the reach of the tweet, spread the word. That is the original meaning of Twitter by the founders – to spread the word the way birds do.
Last night, I looked to see who was eliminated from American Idol, and could not find it for pages because the comment most retweeted and pinned to the top was a snarky witticism rather than news. Ok, it’s just Idol, but when it was Nashville flooding, it took two days to get it to trend. People had no idea and it never did get the exposure it needs and deserves, imho.
I agree that the names are clunky and should be moved to the end for the information to be in front for search engines, but RTs are a better way to say “hello” than literally hundreds of “hellos”, and still spread important or valuable news.
Thank you for this.
Leér:¿Has visto tus RT (retweets) re-gorjeos desaparecer? He aquí la causa…
If you’ve noticed your RT’s missing…
One thing on twitter that would be helpful is a way to delete DM’s in groups as you can do in email by checking multiple messages and deleting them all at once instead of 1 at a time which takes foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!! Thanks
I don’t think DM’s were ever meant to be deleted or managed in any way. Twitter is just a stream of information. Only the most up to date content is relevant, while older tweets or DM’s are only of historical value.
Use DM Whacker bookmarklet by @dcortesi =)
http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/
Suggested to me by @Donnette
Thanks Anite and @Donnette for DM Whacker. :)
Now it appears they’ve gone right back to doing it.
All RT tweets are being filtered out of
-homepage searchbox search, and
-hashtag search
I’m not sure that it’s a matter of reverted, or still doing it. I’m getting some crossed reports from people who are having issues still, and others who aren’t. Might be a google-esque rollout, where “features” are only available on one search server or another.
I notice that any RT or FF mentions that included @slainson are gone. It’s been that way for several weeks. Since I don’t monitor these messages as they happen, I have no idea who has acknowledged me in some fashion, which is important to me because I personally thank them.
I agree, the DM feature is slow, and these are all great comments. Ditto on all of them. I think that there were more instances, where the RTs were not being searched and routed as generally accepted standard, and or terms of use issues were not considered. If I make coffee everyday for three years, it may not be specifically in my contract, but somewhere, by someone it is probably assumed, I am making the freakin coffee!!
In this case, one again, big brother attempts to “tweak” something that they want to do to “improve” end user experience, and it falls quickly, almost instantly flat on it’s face, because Big Brother doesn’t bother to get focus groups, take surveys, listen to the public or gather feedack. Seemingly it is their own cloistered network and avid rabid Twitters who give them these wonderful ideas, but instead of say “Test” marketing it “Locally” first, which I assume they have the capacity to do, since they have locality features which would limit it’s impact on the population as a whole. Then after “testing” they could apply themselves to an even greater region while fine tuning the beta tweak retweet if you will. Then a few buzz phrases, rumor, innuendo, some blogging, maybe a roll out on GoodMorning with Patty Lauer, and Voila! You’ve got yourself a popular, well liked, and efficient tool …..Instead of this cluster …..of problems.
But Twitter only impugns their own image. Instead, this little “tweak” only turns out to be another example of back door “fixing” which is percieved by the Twitteratti and Blogosphere as a bit overhanded, taking away one’s freedoms and generally impinging on the very toes of those they’d like to convert first. So their project does not even get out of the hanger, let alone to the runway.
Enough from me, follow me on Twitter, at http://www.twitter.com/SmartMkting For Once, a gal you can drink with, and still talk shop!! LOL
Any word on why twitter reverted to filtering out RT’s?
Oh good grief, I feel like I’m in a revolving door sometimes with this stuff. Let’s make a change, let’s unmake the change, let’s redo the change, let’s change the change..and that’s in less than one day! I like the whole notion of KISS…I do retweet quite a bit, and in a social media capacity, when I see information that I know my followers will be interested in or a cause I believe in is trying to grow. Can’t it just go back to that? Sigh.
I think it should be up to the users and not Twitter to chose what search results they want to see!
Like search results without.. or with RT/TR
Very glad to see Twitter respond positively to the objections of its community of core users. It tells me Twitter is headed in the right direction. Do wish they would also relent and allow us the sort of RT options TweetDeck allows: RT as is and immediately or “quote” and share your own content as desired – best of both worlds. Please Twitter?
Thank you so much for making your query to Twitter and thank you to Twitter for responding. It took four of us to research the tweet / retweet issue and to write this post for our readers, complete with multiple Twitter accounts and screenshots: http://www.handshake20.com/2010/05/who-sees-my-tweets.html
I very happily linked our post to this post and repeat my conclusion: Whew! And thank you again!