Twitter offering limited Retweet Rollout feature to its users

// November 18th, 2009 // Web

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Twitter is constantly providing new features to its users, with the newest addition being the Retweet (also known as RT). Essentially a Retweet is a message created by one user, then repeated by another while giving credit to them.

The common format of a Retweet is to begin the tweet message with RT, then add the name of the person quoted, e.g. ‘RT @lukedench’, and then continuing with the message they originally posted. Twitter users tend to retweet in their own way, others rewriting the messages and then giving credit to the initial poster by saying ‘via @lukedench’.

Once Retweet started to become popular, Twitter 3rd party clients started to roll out features to automatically be able to retweet messages, some of which are TweetDeck, Twitterific, CoTweet, and many others.

This new Twitter feature, currently only available to a small segment of the Twitter network’s users, offers the users the ability to retweet (essentially, repost) any tweet from Twitter.com using the web-based interface, taking away the need to use a 3rd party application, or having to copy/paste the message and include the Retweet abbreviation.

Twitter has added a retweet button next to the reply button on the tweet, so you can choose any message you want to share with those following you or in the public timeline (those who post on Twitter, with the exception of users protecting their tweets, have their messages viewed by everyone).

Once a message has been retweeted, it will show under the original tweet a notification indicating the users who have retweeted that message. This also allows for message authenticity as users can see the message exactly as it was written by the user who initially posted it.

An unfortunate note to make is that retweets made using this feature cannot be edited, which means that comments cannot be added to the tweet or allow it to be rephrased or rewritten in another language.

Furthermore, as this is part of the new Twitter API, 3rd party tools currently not supporting it, will not feature the official Retweet and may not show up on the application until the developers have made adjustments to the programs and released new updates.

Being fully aware of the positive and negative features that come with the official retweet function, would you use it, or would you instead prefer the popular practice of writing RT where you can rewrite the message as you seem fit before posting it?

(via Twitter)