Liking the New Twitter Feature – Tell Me Who Liked What I Wrote

This past month (5/23/2011), Twitter introduced a new feature: email notifications whenever someone “Favorites” or retweets one of your posts (as long as you “follow” that Twitter user). It’s only been three weeks since the feature was rolled out, but I’m finding it to be a dang useful feature!

Why It’s Useful

My tweets are hodge-podge of information, but generally relate to CRM, Salesforce.com, cloud-computing, agile methodologies, privacy and security. These are my hot buttons, the areas of technology I am most interested in. These are the topics I tweet and blog about. More than likely, the folks who follow me share some of these same interests (otherwise, why follow?).

I get a lot of useful information from the folks I follow on Twitter. I especially like the way Paper.Li delivers all this content to my mailbox, in a newspaper format, twice daily.

Like many Twitter users, I like to reciprocate. I hope that the information I am tweeting is useful to those who follow me. Until this Twitter feature came along, my tweets have been largely a “one way” communication. Occasionally, users would retweet a particular message, and I’d see evidence of that in a my twitter stream. But now, getting an email link with of everything that has been favorited or retweeted gives more direct feedback. It lets me see who liked something I wrote. Those positive feedback loops are important in social tribes. Being able to see how often something you posted was “liked”, marked as a “favorite” or “+1” gives the author a sense of appreciation: someone found this information useful, I should do more like that.

Enabling and Disabling the Feature

When the feature was rolled out, it was set to enable for all users.  You can change those settings easily: when logged into twitter, click the drop-down icon next to your name, settings, Notifications tab, and uncheck the appropriate activity checkboxes.

What do you think of the new feature?  Like it or hate it?  Do you think it might change the way you or others tweet?

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