For a long time, I've thought that retweeting was the most interesting thing about Twitter - and not just explicit retweeting, but also implicit retweeting (people posting the same URL around the same time, which may or may not really be an intentional retweet). I've thought of them as similar to links in hypertext and like others, I created a site that analyzes relationships among people by looking at their retweeting patterns.
This may sound odd, but making a user action easier for everyone is not always a good idea. An overly simple explanation for this is that the less effort it is to do something, the less significant the action becomes. That doesn't mean that everything should be hard, it means there's an optimal level of difficulty v. reward in social behavior. I'd rather not see Twitter encouraging a particular kind of social connection until the structures it supports are better understood. Has anybody really shown the value of retweeting in creating strong social networks? If so, it it clear that the API would tend to further strengthen them? I fear that the API is motivated by a more naive assumption - people are doing this anyway, so let's make it easier. While that assumption is fine for things like soap, it isn't right for social behavior. I've been doing social media analytics for a long time. One of the things I'm always trying to measure is how much energy went into a particular user behavior or action. For example, a message that contains more original words took more energy than a shorter one. A message that quotes more than one person takes more energy than one that quotes just one person. A message that contains a URL probably took more energy than one that doesn't. If the URL is unique in the medium, it probably took more energy to create than a URL that already existed. If the effect of the retweet API is to make retweeting so simple that the act of retweeting loses much of its significance, that's a net loss. More people might retweet, but less of them will be deeply engaged. Social systems should never have the goal of getting everyone to the same level of engagement. It is human nature for some to be opinion leaders, but they don't easily emerge when "playing the game" is made easy for everyone. Unfortunately, the idea of getting as many people as possible to be as active as possible is a deeply engrained habit in the media industry. But any successful community manager or analyst will tell you that it is far more important to pay attention and nurture the "core community" that exists in any social network. The sweet spot for ease of retweeting lies somewhere between it being so hard that only the most committed users do it (and the current manual method is far better than that) and being so easy that everybody essenially "votes" on everything, which would be bad. Even though that sounds like democracy, it is really demarchy. Seen any successful demarchies? I didn't think so. I'm not so sure that Twitter isn't already in the sweet spot and the API is going to drive it away from there. I suspect that Twitter and those who analyze it haven't had enough time to really figure out how it will fit into the social networking ecosystem in the long run, so any decsions about this are premature. I'd rather see them continue make the social network easier to analyze, not just for the sake of analytics, but because the results of analytics are getting fed back into the network, which makes the network smarter and smarter.
