New Comm Biz

(Note: I’ll be using RT to denote the manual or app enabled retweeting most of us use, and the spelled out ‘retweet’ to denote Twitters new native capability)

As many of you may know one of Webster’s newest additions to their dictionary is “Unfriend” (apparently my spell check doesn’t realize that yet). It always seems like Webster’s puts on one word in their for pure social media buzz. Probably a good move.

But I really wanted to talk about newest (anti)social feature: un-retweet. That’s right, did you RT something that you later decided you didn’t want to RT? Right now your only option is to delete the tweet, which of course doesn’t really delete it from the twittersphere, just from your time line. But if you retweeted using Twitter’s new retweet functionality then you now have the option to undo that retweet.

This really makes Twitter’s retweet feature more like a voting mechanism. This obviously has a ton of implications on the future of Twitter search. Instead of just a time line based search Twitter can now give you a most popular (based on retweets) or location, thanks to the geo location capabilities of Twitter. (Assuming of course you actually turned them on.)

Retweeting a RT

You’ll notice in the above the differences between a RT and a retweet. When you can manually edit a RT and append additional commentary. But retweeting is cleaner and ads more of a voting functionality to it.

In the Retweets section of your Twitter account you can see this a little more clearly.

Retweets by you

The only post I retweeted so far was this Engadget post. I wanted to see how well it worked. I couldn’t capture the undo option in a screen grab so I tool a short 10 video to show you roll over feature.

I was a huge skeptic of Twitter rolling out their retweet functionality, but I’m starting to warm up to it. I don’t see manual RT’s going away, especially until it’s integrated into the major Twitter clients. There will always be the need/desire to append a tweet with your own commentary. But given the cool things retweets will let us do (like ranking tweets) I can definitely see this catching on.

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