Seventeen things that people are actually saying when they retweet others
Retweeting (that is, repeating someone else's tweet, with attribution) has emerged from daily twittering habits and has become part of Twitter's cultural vocabulary. — The idea of rebroadcasting something …
Context & Ripple Effects
Retweeting has grown up entirely bottom-up: no one at Twitter designed it, and by May 2009 the copy-paste-with-attribution habit has become part of the service's cultural vocabulary. That matters because the platform itself is exploding — confirmed reports this month show US unique visitors up 83% between March and April per ComScore, with traffic pushing Twitter past Bebo, LinkedIn, the New York Times and Digg in growth rankings.
The timing is delicate. A week earlier, Twitter's user base had already shown how fiercely it defends its own habits, when a feature removal triggered heavy backlash and press criticism over a turbulent 24 hours. A post cataloguing what people 'actually mean' when they retweet lands right in that gap between folk practice and official product — the same tension earlier coverage like ReadWriteWeb's Tweeterboard was poking at back in December 2007.
First-order effects
- Twitter users gain a shared vocabulary for a behavior that until now has been improvised, making attribution norms explicit at exactly the moment the influx of new users — 83% monthly growth in US visitors — threatens to dilute them.
Second-order effects
- With usage compounding faster than Twitter ships features, community-defined conventions like the retweet harden into de facto standards, raising the stakes for whether the company formalizes the mechanic natively or leaves third-party clients to own it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms will keep absorbing user-invented behaviors into official product — meaning interface design increasingly follows emergent community practice rather than leading it, and the company that codifies a folk norm controls its economics.
The trend: Social platforms are converting organic user behaviors into formalized features, with the retweet as an early test of whether companies or communities own the service's grammar.