You might have noticed that you are no longer seeing tweet buttons with a counter on them. As of late November, Twitter has officially done away with the old tweet count feature that they have had since their beginning. While some are upset at it's removal, believing that the tweet counter helped users gauge the quality of their content, Twitter explained that the number could be misleading. According to Twitter, "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." However the main reasoning behind the deprecation of this feature is more technical. Twitter explained that they relied on Cassandra to count tweet shares previously. They are completing a migration away from it in favor of Manhattan, their real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale. They also explained that there was a tradeoff between deprecating the feature or rebuilding it with their new system. They chose to leave it behind, and in doing so not delay work on newer projects they have in the works.
