Today I learned about Twitter’s new “Project Retweet,” an initiative by which Twitter will proactively adopt retweeting functionality into their platform. Twitter’s being proactive about bringing more features into their service is on the surface a good thing, but once I delved into @Biz’s description of how the new feature will work, I realized how poor the approach that they seem to be taking might be.
Here’s how I understand it to work: on the Twitter website a retweet function will appear near the existing reply function on each tweet you see in your timeline. Using the retweet function will echo the original tweet, appearing as a tweet for the original poster rather than a tweet from you.
The new post will appear in your follower’s timelines as if it were posted by the original author complete with that author’s avatar and username instead of yours with only a small notation at the bottom of the tweet that it was retweeted by you. If I’m following you but I’m not following the user whom you’ve retweeted, essentially what will happen is that a stranger’s tweet will show up in my timeline.
If I’m following just a handful of users whom I’m familiar with, then it may be obvious that the stranger’s tweet was reposted by someone I follow, but I don’t follow a handful of users; I follow a thousand users. I don’t even recognize many of the people I follow who are appearing in my timeline; I don’t keep track of whom each of the people I follow is.
I follow a core group of people whom I trust partly because of the information they retweet; their retweets help me “discover” more valuable things — people, facts, ideas, issues, opportunities, etc. To me this is exactly how Twitter creates value: enabling individuals to rapidly create and spread weak knowledge and relationship connections across a broad landscape, connections that make sense to me and are relevant to me and enable further connections.
As soon as the source or origin of the connection begins to erode, the connection begins to lose value. In other words, if I don’t know why a particular user’s tweet is showing up in my timeline there’s a high probability I’m going to skim right over it and ignore it; whereas, if a tweet appears from my core group whom I recognize there’s a high probability I’m going to read it.
The way retweets are currently passed around allows me to identify a potentially new and valuable connection originating from a user whom I already trust and whom I’ve already chosen to follow because they are doing just that: providing new and valuable connections. Disconnect the tweet from the trusted source and the connection won’t be created. Twitter’s discovery value will erode.
A few months ago Twitter eliminated the option to see @replies by people you follow to people you don’t follow. Seeing whom my trusted core group was talking with allowed me to discover new people to follow — another example of relying on the people you follow to present new and valuable connections. Once this disappeared Twitter began turning into a much bigger echo chamber with a much smaller opportunity to discover and create new, valuable connections.
In fact, I rarely add new followers anymore at all because Twitter broke the connection thread I relied upon to discover new people to follow.
The user backlash was tremendous and the founders were contrite yet they did not restore the functionality they took away. They only gave us a vague promise of a new method, saying, “the use cases that folks loved about this setting will return in a new and improved form,” which has yet to materialize.
If Twitter proceeds with “Project Retweet,” Twitter will break another valuable connection mechanism, the echo chamber will reverberate even more loudly and the opportunity to discover new value through Twitter will be eroded even further.
How will we find new connections via Twitter then? Will Twitter’s discovery value completely disappear? I don’t have the answers to those questions, and until I do Twitter’s future value to me is rapidly approaching zero.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Around 3:30pm today I noticed that Facebook’s chat application had been upgraded. I wasn’t aware an upgrade was in the works, but the features they’ve released are extremely useful.
Your friends are now grouped by the list you assigned them to, and you can choose which lists you want to appear in the chat application.
Facebook Chat Groups Interface
You can also appear online selectively to these lists while appearing offline to others via a very iPhone-like toggle switch to the right of each list’s name. Re-order your lists, show Feed stories in the chat window and suppress avatars in the online user list.
Facebook Chat Options
Active chat sessions appear at the top of the online user list, although it seems new chat message notifications do not appear with the proper section. New message notifications are all showing next to the first session listed.
Facebook Chat Bug
The best feature is that the entire chat app can now pop-out of the Facebook webpage, just like Google’s web-based Gtalk. I had just told @MCGSTUDIO and @longbrook this past Friday how nice this feature would be!
I’m not sure if every user has access to the new chat features. What do you think of the new features? Did I miss anything? What would you add to the featureset?
Hi, Joe. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinions on personal branding.
The terms “personal brand” and “personal reputation” are not interchangeable nor do they mean the same thing, and perhaps that is the source of confusion. “Brand” precedes and defines “reputation” in a space where your reputation is not already known.
Prior to the advent of the web, search engines and social media platforms, your personal brand was called “your resume,” at least in professional circles anyway, and it had severely limited distribution. Your resume was, or should have been, crafted to present your reputation in a positive light, in a way that would appeal to your target audience who had no prior experience with your prior accomplishments. Your resume preceded and defined your professional reputation.
Today we can easily reach out much farther than before, and in the case of “reputation management,” we can be reached by many more people much easier than ever before, and it’s only getting easier. That means many more people who have no idea of your accomplishments might be trying to draw conclusions about who you are. Enter the “personal brand.”
I want to control as best as I can my image that people may discover. I want to avoid the possibility that someone may have an idea of who I am that is not to my benefit. So I craft a brand that says what I want people to think about me; I craft a promise of my past and future accomplishments; I craft trustworthiness and reliability; I craft all the same concepts that companies do through their brands for myself. Then I have to deliver on that promise, just like companies do, or the brand will fail; the brand will be untrustworthy creating the wrong reputation.
Brands are not for the existing “customers” of the brand; that’s what reputation is for and where reputation is built. Brands are for future customers; a promise of reputation to be delivered. The brand defines and precedes the reputation.
My name is Lyell E. Petersen, and my personal brand is 93octane. Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts.
Lyell E. Petersen / 93octane
@93octane on Twitter
Originally posted as a comment by 93octane / Lyell E. Petersen on Helping Small Business help themselves – Network Solutions using Disqus.
