On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:37:32PM -0800, Dewald Pretorius wrote: > This collapsing behavior is far from ideal and will cause people with > busy timelines to completely miss retweets.
I disagree completely. If you have 57 retweets of the same status in your timeline, then all this duplicated, redundant noise forces fresh, new content off the end prematurely. It gets bad enough at times that I'm forced to tell TweetDeck to filter out everything containing the text "RT @". One of the first features that got me thinking about building a custom Twitter client was that I wanted to be able to identify and filter out duplicate updates so that I would see each status update *once*, no matter how many people were repeating it. Thankfully, Twitter is now (or will shortly be) providing that function automatically. (Although, if I were to have done it, I would go a step further and suppress *all* retweets if the original had appeared in my timeline.) > With old-style retweets, if I saw ten retweets of the same thing, I > knew to check it out because obviously a lot of people felt it was > something worth sharing with their followers. And if I saw them, I would think "Oh, good god... I wasn't interested in it the first nine times, I'm not going to be interested this time either. How long do I have to wait before people just shut up about that already?" > In my irrelevant opinion, the new retweet feature is trying to fix > something that was not broken. As another response mentioned, clients have the ability to un-collapse retweets, so those of us who view constant retweets of the same thing as worthless noise can get our timelines uncluttered and those of you who use them as a means to judge social approval and/or importance have the tools to do that as well. Give it a couple weeks, and I bet someone will be working on a way to do that which works even better than the old-style retweets, perhaps based on preiodically polling the retweets timeline and presenting its contents sorted by most retweets in the last hour/day. This change sets the stage for serving both of us better. -- Dave Sherohman
