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The new Retweet is cool!

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I sort of understand why people don't like the new retweet, but I like it very much, and probably for many of the reasons they don't like it.  

If you follow me on Twitter you know that a lot of my tweets are links to stories on the web. I would probably forward other people's links more if there were a way to give them credit for the link without adding all that overhead to the text. I find that once you add a bit of text to a tweet you dilute its meaning. Do it two or three times and its a confusing mess. I don't know who said what.  

Worse, often the meaning of messages are reversed when they're retweeted. Not only does the person show off that they didn't understand what was said, but they propogate the mistake by sending it to all their followers.  

In the new method, forwarding a link through Twitter is error-free, no noise is added because it can't, and the lineage is carried as metadata, and doesn't take up any of the 140 characters. 

I applaud features that don't use up the 140 characters, and like even more features that give them back to us. I think Twitter should be encouraged to do more to pull data out of the text of a tweet and carry it as metadata, so apps can do stuff with it, and so people get to use the 140 chars to say what they have to say.  

I do almost no retweeting in the old regime. But I already do a lot more now, and will do even more once everyone has the feature. Once it's been out there for a few weeks I think we'll wonder how we ever lived without it.