After the initial years for Twitter in which they wanted to keep their service as pure or spartan as possible, they have included three big changes in the last couple of months. The first one is lists, which they implemented differently than I expected (I expected a similar way as Friendfeed or Facebook, but the ability to share your lists is pretty nice).
The second one are the retweets and the last one is the geolocation data attached to tweets. It was always possible to add a location to your account and change that information with some Twitter applications, but the new thing is that now you can attach a locaton to any tweet. I don’t immediately use this myself, but it is very interesting for third party apps and services. See my blog post on communicating in real life like the way you do on the internet and in games from April 2008 to see what I mean. This is a Google translated page, but I hope it’s readable.
I’ve said before that the three things I’d like to see added to twitter were comments (or threaded replies), likes and lists (basically I just want Friendfeed with the community of twitter). So I guess two out of those three have been fulfilled. Let me explain. Lists are obviously in place, but I believe the new retweet function are similar to likes. All it does is share it to your followers, without you being able to add anything to it. I think it’s wise to take the “retweeted by” out of the 140 character since that is way to short anyway and we can agree it’s not really primarily a service for text messages anymore.
Some people are confused by the fact that other people’s avatars and tweets whom they aren’t following are now in their timeline, but if you think about before the change other people tweets came into your timeline too. My newspaper, which prints a daily tweet had to rectify yesterday’s tweet because they had the author wrong. Apparently they have trouble figuring it out too.
One other cool thing about the retweets is, when you see them as likes, you can take a look at the most liked ones. And believe it or not, Twitter has already added that to the web interface. Just click on retweets on the right in the menu and you’ll be taken to the tweets that are most retweeted and your retweets and you tweets retweeted by others. The algorithm behind the most retweeted is just not really clear to me yet and it would be nice to have a best of day/week or something.
Well, this ‘short’ blogpost became way too long again, but I’m very curious what you think of the new features and the retweet feature in particular. What other addition would you like to see by Twitter? Oh and don’t forget to retweet this post by clicking the button in the top right :-)
