Micro-blogging site Twitter has released a statement explaining its decision to remove share counts from tweet buttons in a new-design drive scheduled to take place in November.
Twitter in a statement some weeks back announced that the share count feature will be yanked off the tweet and follow buttons, meaning that tweeps will not be able to monitor the popularity of their tweets by seeing how many retweets and follow backs their tweets have generated.
What this means is that when you tweet, you will find it impossible to know the number of twitter users who may have retweeted your message and so find it difficult to know about its popularity, as is currently obtainable.
The decision reportedly sparked debates among web publishing folks who sought to know the reason behind the proposed removal of this feature.
But In a blog post titled ‘Hard Decisions for a Sustainable Platform’, Twitter has provided several, technical reason why they’re moving away from displaying share counts on tweet buttons.
“One of our goals is to build a predictable, dependable platform for you to build your websites, apps, and businesses. We also want to ensure that the products we build are supported by Twitter Engineering. As a result, we design for longevity in order to limit any questions about deprecating APIs. Like you, we have finite engineering resources, which requires us to make choices about which products and public APIs we invest in.”
Explaining this message, a tech blog Social Media Today said: “The mechanism through which Twitter currently counts tweet shares is through Cassandra, so as part of the migration to Manhattan, it’s impossible to keep offering tweet counts, at least not without considerable costs in re-building the system.”
This in layman language means that Twitter will remove the feature because it’s costing the company too much resources (monetary, especially) to run the service at no cost to the user.
While explaining the specific changes to be made to the tweet button, Twitter said:
“The Tweet button counts the number of Tweets that have been Tweeted with the exact URL specified in the button. This count does not reflect the impact on Twitter of conversation about your content — it doesn’t count replies, quote Tweets, variants of your URLs, nor does it reflect the fact that some people Tweeting these URLs might have many more followers than others.”
So what Twitter’s saying, in effect, is that the tweet button isn’t really reflective of performance anyway, so its relevance is questionable. Twitter goes on to note that the tweet count has never existed as part of their API endpoints and that most share buttons provided by other social networks don’t include counts either, Social Media Today explained.