After initially disliking the new retweet functionality on Twitter, I’ve grown to like it. It’srediculously easy to retweet someone else now. It’s literally 2 clicks, only 1 if you dare remove the overly protective ‘Are you sure you want to retweet this?’ confirmation that some twitter clients are keen on.
But that also means that people you follow are retweeting far more.
Before, retweets looked fairly discreet, they just had RT at the beginning within the tweet itself. Now though, if you choose to use the new ‘baked in’ retweet, the tweeted tweeter gets their avatar in your stream. This seems nice because it gives prominence to people that give good tweet. Thereby helping people to discover more people to follow. But then, some people aren’t as judicious with the retweet button.
Scobleizer is one of those industry pundits that I’ve followed, unfollowed and followed again a couple of times now. It’s usually some kind of passive self-important tweet that gets me reaching for the unfollow.
And today, I came across this nice little feature on the main web client.
So, when you visit the profile in question, you see this.
There’s a couple of reasons this doesn’t totally appeal to me. Firstly, if I start blocking retweets from one person and I have nowhere to see them all in one place, it feels a bit messy. I personally need somewhere to get an overview of this kind of thing. It feels like my setting would be too spread out. But that’s fairly personal. Secondly, that little icon is the same as the button that’s actually used to retweet. It seems counter-intuitive that you would click the same button to stop retweets as you would to actually retweet them. Picky I know, but these little things are important to us.
What I’d really love is a way of not quite unfollowing someone but just taking a bit of break from them. I want to say ‘Shhh Scoble, that’s enough, it’s not you, it’s me, I’ve just had my fill of gushing and over-excited tech coverage for one day”. It would be like some kind of purgatory you could send people to. Like taking a break.
