The days of Retweeting may be numbered. Twitter has been testing more mainstream verbiage by replacing “Retweet” with “Share.” Twitter has been quite active in tweaking the user interface as of late. Last week, “views” were spotted and yesterday, we saw the introduction of tagging without adding a Twitter handle in the Tweet.
Eli Langer of CNBC complied a custom timeline with examples of the share button in the wild (warning – some examples may contain NFSW language):
Studies have shown that many users find Twitter too difficult to understand. This test is geared toward the Twitter newbie who may be more familiar simply sharing a status rather than taking the time to understand what a Retweet is.
Of course the flip side of making Twitter a more user friendly service is that the advanced users love Twitter for what it is, a simple network. Turning Twitter into Facebook or Google+ may take some of the luster away from the simplicity of Twitter which was the number one reason that it rose to prominence in the first place.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment.
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