Nick McGuire

Alright so I wanted to do a little blog on Twitter's new 'Retweet' feature and what I think about it.

So Twitter has been working on this feature for a while but it's gone live for all users over the past two weeks.  A bunch of native twitter clients for the iPhone have jumped on this feature and apple has pushed this into the store quickly, which makes me think they have certain apps they'll approve above others but that is for another blog entry.  This new feature for those who never read the internet or use Twitter's real site/a native client that doesn't support this, is that now when you "Retweet" a tweet, it shows the original author's avatar in your feed, and underneath the tweet it says which of the people you follow 'retweeted' it (This is how Twitter's site does it, it's up to the app how they want to show it).  In my opinion, this is the way it should have always been however there are pros and cons to every situation and this is no different.  So let's talk about the pros, which are that if the author decided to indulge and use all 140 characters to make a meaningful tweet, in the old system you would have been S.O.L. for trying to RT (short form for Retweet) it, now though it is a simple button press and it's been RTed and you didn't lose a single character to add the necessary format to RT it.  Another pro is that now if a bunch of people you follow RT the same tweet you aren't seeing a bunch of different people saying the same thing, you're just seeing the same thing a bunch of times, not a huge pro but it makes it a bit more uniform which I like.  Cons, if the author leaves some of his or her 140 characters, and you want to personalize the RT you're going to hate the new system because it's a press of a button and it's done, not allowing you to add to the tweet in the slightest, which sucks sometimes. Another con is that the system isn't in every native client which means that the old system is mingling with the new system and it makes my feed look very ugly and hard to read at times but it's a small gripe, I just wish it was one or the other but that is a personal preference.  So I'll sum this up, I like the new retweet feature and it's take on how it should work, if you read this and disagree, comment.