retweet – Stay N Alive

Category: retweet

Miss Those Old Style Retweets on Twitter.com? Try This Kynetx Extension

Posted on by jessestay

One of my biggest annoyances with the new Twitter API has been the migration to the new “retweet” structure where clicking the retweet button pulls the person’s Tweet into your own stream, with the person’s name and profile picture attached to it.  The problem with this method is that it is not near as visible, especially on many clients that do not fully support this.  Using the old style, “RT @soandso such and such” is a much more effective medium in most cases, and, in my experience, results in many more people sharing and seeing your message.  Evidently I’m not alone, as Mike Grace, a developer for Kynetx, wrote his own extension for Firefox and Chrome, which adds a old-style retweet link next to the new-style retweet link, giving you more options in retweeting your friends’ Tweets.

The extension, built on the Kynetx platform, is just one of many useful extensions (including my “like” button extension) intended to bring more functionality, using a single extensions (and event-driven) platform to the sites you browse on the web.  According to Grace, “I got really sick of doing the copy and paste dance so I built a Kynetx app that adds the “RT” functionality that I want.”

So, if you’re looking for old-style retweets on top of Twitter.com, head on over to Mike Grace’s blog and download the extension.  I think it’s a pretty nifty extension!

Disclaimer: I have no ownership or interest in Kynetx other than I think they’re a really cool, Utah-based, technology startup that gets us much closer to the web with no log in button.  Oh, and they have great free lunches they offer to the public on Fridays – you should come!

Screenshots Emerge of the New Twitter Retweet Feature

Posted on by jessestay

twitter-retweet-feature-1Nick 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

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.