Why Retweet works the way it does
This week on Twitter, we're rolling a feature we've been working on for a while out to a lot more users. (If you don't have it yet, you will soon.) That feature is our native version of Retweet, which Biz posted about on the Twitter blog a couple months ago.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter’s native Retweet feature moved from an initial Project Retweet phase in August to a limited rollout in early November. The wider release turns a sharing convention associated with the service into a product-controlled action available to more accounts.
The change lands as Twitter is adding features through its LinkedIn partnership and faces commentary that the service’s volume can be difficult to navigate. A standardized sharing mechanism gives Twitter more control over how redistributed posts appear and travel.
First-order effects
- More Twitter users receive the native Retweet function, replacing ad hoc copying of posts with a consistent in-product sharing action.
- Original authors and followers are affected by Twitter’s chosen presentation of redistributed posts rather than the varied formats users had created themselves.
Second-order effects
- Twitter gains a clearer product surface for measuring and shaping redistribution, while third-party clients and users must accommodate the platform’s native sharing behavior.
- The LinkedIn feature partnership makes standardized Twitter sharing more valuable as Twitter extends its features across another service.
Third-order effects
- The rollout points to Twitter absorbing user-created conventions into platform features, shifting influence over distribution norms from community practice to product design.
- If Twitter continues formalizing the service’s microsyntax and sharing behaviors, the platform’s interface choices will increasingly determine which forms of participation are easiest to use and recognize.
The trend: Social platforms are turning emergent user conventions into native controls, concentrating the rules of distribution in the product layer.