Monday, November 23, 2009

Twitter Retweet Follow/Unfollow

I really have only one thing to add to the ongoing discussion of the new Twitter Retweet integration, other than the obvious, that I use a third party client so I don't really care.

I am noticing that when somebody in my network retweets somebody who is not in my network from the Twitter home page, I see:
  1. the retweet,
  2. a message telling me "Wondering who this is? Someone you follow thought this was worth retweeting, which is why you are seeing it in your Home timeline."
Is this valuable? Perhaps! The obvious reason is that I may want to follow the person who is being retweeted... but the more obtuse value? I may want to unfollow the person who is doing the retweeting, based on the people with whom they keep company. This may actually be more valuable to me in the long run.

If Twitter gave me the option to follow the person I am not following, or unfollow the person I am following, I would absolutely love this feature.

2 comments:

Clare K. R. Miller said...

You could just click to their profile and follow/unfollow. I've already done that (unfollow) once. Also, doesn't it say that you can go to their profile to opt not to get retweets from them? I remember it saying that.

P. M. Hollott said...

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying... I'm not sure if I'm just reaching the point where I need to prune, and it's a coincidence, but the Project Retweet rollout has done nothing but encourage me to unfollow people!