Twitter and Project Retweet

We’ve been keeping an eye on Twitter for some time now. I’ve been using it for my own hobbies and interests for a while, and the company Twitter account is @canweelucidate. Twitter is really interesting for a couple of reasons - the main one, of course, being that so many people are using it. It’s had phenomenal growth over the last few months.

One of the other reasons, though, is the way we’re seeing emergent behaviour. For instance, the mechanism of replying to someone else by prefixing their username with an ‘@’ symbol - that wasn’t built in. People just started to use it, and then Twitter built in some support for it. Likewise, the convention of ‘RT @username’ for retweets - the Twitter equivalent of forwarding something in email - comes wholly from the users, not from the service. And now, Twitter are talking about building in handling of retweets, calling it Project Retweet.

This can happen because Twitter is a service run by one company, not a standard that works across the internet. On the one hand, this is great because it allows them to make this kind of change, improving the service for everyone to use. And on the other hand, my ex-techie protocol-purist side is muttering a bit, because the internet is founded on protocols that use wide standards, like email and http, based on the old RFC arrangements. If Twitter should decide to change their service in ways that people don’t like, there’s nothing to do but go along - no company has that power over email, or the hyper-text transfer protocol that makes the web go. And of course, if Twitter close up shop (it’s still not clear to me, or anyone else, how they make any money) the whole thing goes away.

Twitter are hiring people - their jobs page lists the best end of 30 positions at the moment - so they clearly reckon they’ll be able to make it keep going.