Twitter Search Ranked By ReTweets

The existence of any ranking system based on retweeting, officially sponsored by Twitter or not, will have a negative impact on the Twitter experience. It will change the way people tweet. IMO, that is a bad thing.

Yesterday [I posted][1] about filtering Twitter search results and I left off with a quote about Google’s PageRank which I think is apropos to the discussion of ranking tweets based on the number of retweets (or twitterers based on the number of tweets being retweeted – or sheer number of retweets from a twtterer)

PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to “understand” the web caused the web itself to change. -Jeremy Zawodny

The importance of this cannot be understated. Google, once a company which wanted to provide relevant search results by understanding the relationships between webpages, is now a company that dictates the decisions of millions of webmasters. They don’t do this by decree, it is simply a function of people’s desires to be found on the web.

Google’s idea was a good one – use the structure and nature of html pages to rank them in terms of importance (“authority”) and then use that as one criterion for determining the relevancy of a page. This good idea led to at least two inherent problems.

First, it lent authority to webmasters who deserved no such thing. Years ago, I had several web pages with decent pagerank. As a result, I could post a page about almost any subject and my page would rank higher (perhaps) than a real expert on the subject. As I noted yesterday, others have pointed out this problem. Of course, the web being what it is, my page could be usurped by the proper authority on the subject – IF the web behaved as it used to. This brings us to the next problem.

The web now behaves differently because of Google. I am not complaining about this. I am not unhappy about Google’s existence – quite the opposite. I am simply making an observation that many others have made before me. Webmasters now have some understanding of PageRank and now decide how to construct websites to optimize it.

A retweet ranking system will cause the same thing to happen with Twitter. It will undoubtedly cause people to change the way they tweet. Many users will:

1. think twice before tweeting something that is not “retweetable”
   There go all the fun updates about feeding the kids, eating breakfast, etc. I know many of you don’t like those, but I’d argue that most users enjoy this Twitter “nonsense.”

2. compose more retweetable tweets

Now more tweets will be like those annoyingly profound “updates” on Facebook – yuk!

1. ask for retweets
   I propose that any ranking system automatically take this into account and not credit for any tweet which contains the phrase “please retweet” or similar.

2. retweet less
   Many will hesitate to give away authority to others, or at least be more careful about who they give it to. This is very similar to PageRank leak.

3. seek more followers
   While number of retweets is certainly better than a straight ranking based on number of followers, it is still very much a function of the number of followers. Ideally, those with more followers need to be retweeted less but I assume that doesn’t hold up in practice. More followers will probably lead to more retweets.

Obviously, I am assuming a simple ranking system which rewards users whose tweets have been retweeted. I understand that a system can be put in place that ranks the tweets and not the twitterer. I’d argue that all points above still hold. I also understand that a more complex formula can be devised, but the point is still that people will tweet differently. Imagine a system that rewards one for retweeting other’s tweets. This will lead to a Digg-like echo chamber where perhaps very few tweet original content.

As I said in yesterday’s post, I am in favor of filtering my Twitter search results. I’m just not a big fan of ranking by retweets. More on that later. [1]: /twitter-search-by-authority/