Screenshots Emerge of the New Twitter Retweet Feature - Stay N Alive

Screenshots Emerge of the New Twitter Retweet Feature

twitter-retweet-feature-1-300x106-5671666Nick Shin just wrote me mentioning he has the new Twitter retweet feature on his account, @marketwire.  He wrote about it on his blog which you can read here.  It would appear it works very much in a similar way to how Twitter original mentioned.

To start, users with this feature will have a message at the top of their stream mentioning they have the new features.  Each Tweet in your timeline on Twitter.com will have a new “retweet” icon that appears similar to the “reply” link when you mouse over a Tweet.  When you click on it, you are asked if you want to retweet the message.  Click “yes”, and it gets popped at the top of your friends’ streams, along with a mention that you retweeted it (this is very similar to the way “likes” work on FriendFeed – the message keeps getting recycled so long as people keep liking it).

Underneath each message, it lists each user that retweeted the post.  Instead of being icons of each user, it looks like Twitter is now going the FriendFeed method and listing out the text usernames of each user.  This also brings more discovery potential for each user that retweeted it.

twitter-retweet-feature-3-5709227

So, today marks the day Twitter grows even more like FriendFeed it would seem.  I think this will eventually become even more powerful than the old-form “RT soandso” format because it is much easier to just click a button than type text, but we’ll see how frequently people use this and if the old style continues to be tradition as it is today.  “Retweets” are the new like.  Do you have it?  Do you “like” the new retweet feature?

The images above are just 2 of the images listed on Nick Shinn’s blog.  Be sure to check out his blog for more screenshots and info.  You can follow him on Twitter here.


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15 thoughts on “Screenshots Emerge of the New Twitter Retweet Feature

  1. One of the good things about the current method of retweeting is that it allows a person to add their own two cents to the content they're sending on. From these screenshots, it doesn't look like that's possible.

    This is a good addition by Twitter, but it's going to need some work if they intend everyone to actually put it to use. I like being able to add something, sometimes, to my retweets, so I certainly won't use the new method exclusively when I get it.

  2. Chris, I agree, but I think eventually people will forgo that if this is
    easier. Also, Twitter is going to add threaded replies I'm pretty sure, and
    when that happens a comment to something like that would be pretty easy. I
    think this way will become the preferred method.

  3. The threaded replies really would bring twitter in closer proximity to the FF experience, but I do wonder how listing out the RTs will impact the Twitter economy. I tend not to like the echo chamber that endless RTing creates. Will this ease that or make it worse? With lists already in place, do we really need to RT? Why, for instance, *ever* RT Mashable or Scoble? Stick them in a list, run the list feed to a widget, all done.

  4. The question of threaded replies, though… Will it be a FriendFeed model or a Blellow model? Will the replies be visible to all or just the person who posted the original tweet, or to the original poster and the retweeter?

    No matter how it's done, though, I don't see Twitter satisfying everyone. Unless Twitter starts pushing off people who continue to use the old way, which would probably turn into a PR disaster for them, I don't see the copy & paste RT dying any time soon.

  5. True, Chris–I hope you're right about that. Then again, the RT with a comment isn't just a copy, so . . . I'm in “let's see what it looks like in action” mode. How a thing is designed to be used and how people actually use it (lists being a case in point) don't always match.

  6. Nick, I'm going to click through to your original blog post in just a moment. Currently when I want to retweet, I switch over to slandr and use its one-button retweet functionality. Once I get the Twitter version, I'll compare the two and see which one I like better.

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