I love designing websites, applications, recording music and video, and coming up with new ideas. I'm a big gadget nerd. My skills are in business software development (VB/ASP/ADO.NET) and website design (D/XHTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL).
Currently working on a bunch of webOS applications. RMX Apps delivers high-quality apps for Palm's webOS family of smartphones (currently the Pre and the Pixi).
Recently Twitter enabled its new Retweet feature for my account. If you’re a regular Twitter user I’m sure you’ve heard all the controversy this new feature is causing. Instead of maintaining the already widely used Retweet format (people prefixing retweets with RT followed by a tag to the original user) Twitter is posting the Retweets so they almost appear as regular tweets from the original poster. The only difference is that there is a little Retweet icon with arrows and a message at the bottom of the post that tells you who retweeted it (see below image).
Know what? This would be a great addition save for one simple thing. Why did they have to call it Retweet? Why not just call it Sharing. “Shared by <x> and <y> others.” Or any other name that ISN’T Retweet. I guarantee that if Twitter had left the name “Retweet” alone there wouldn’t have been such an uproar.
This feature is functionally the same as sharing someones post on Facebook, or even “liking” a post on Facebook or Friendfeed. Retweeting was less a “repost” and more of a quote.
Instead of alienating users who feel like the Retweet format was stolen from them, just give it a different name and I promise all will be well.
See Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ explanation for this change here.
