Project Retweet: Phase One
Some of Twitter's best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own …
Context & Ripple Effects
By May 2009, retweeting had developed into a broad set of user practices, documented in an inventory of the different things people mean when they retweet. Twitter’s Phase One turns that community convention into a platform-owned feature, making the mechanics of amplification a product decision rather than a copy-and-paste habit.
First-order effects
- Twitter begins standardizing a sharing behavior that users had previously implemented themselves, changing how people amplify tweets on the service.
Second-order effects
- A platform-defined retweet mechanism makes the meaning and presentation of shared posts more consistent, reducing users’ reliance on their own RT conventions.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter continues productizing behaviors invented by its users, control over the service’s communication norms shifts from informal conventions toward features designed and governed by the platform.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing user-created interaction conventions into native product features, turning community norms into standardized distribution mechanics.