Twitter: “You don’t want the noise, we know what is good for you!”

A good thing in life is that Twitter decides what is good for me. They reduced some noise six months ago by changing the way the replies worked at Twitter. Actually Twitter killed auto discovery, however since they implemented lists a few months later auto discovery is back, however not as good as it was with dipping in conversations that were going on with people you weren’t aware of.

So I am glad to see that Twitter is reducing the noise any further with the implementation of retweets in its ecosystem:

The design is simple: There’s a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet (more on that below). The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they’re built natively into the system, they’re trackable. And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.

It will be very quick and easy to retweet, you’ll never have to edit the text, and you also won’t have to worry if your followers have already seen something, so this should encourage retweeting more and more useful stuff flowing farther.

Well that is something like a disaster isn’t it. You will only get the first copy fo something retweeted multiple times which means that you have no clue of something that is retweeted is really that important. If  ten people in my network retweet something, then I know this is of any importance for me, since I am confronted with the information ten times.

Twitter decreased its value by thinking for their users or as @oscarberg noticed on Twitter: Twitter violates Jakob Nielsens old usability heuristic “User control and freedom” with the new retweet feature.  Noise isn’t the problem, since we are used to that retweeting for years. Duplication isn’t always noise, it is value, it shows the importance of things (trending topics are a great way how data duplication is used to show importance).

I am so happy that Twitter knows what is good for me, although maybe I am that not realizing right now.