Like many of you, when Twitter introduced the “new style” retweets we shook our heads. Their intentions were good: being able to retweet long tweets, ensuring that the original tweet has been unedited, and hiding repeat retweets from the timeline are all theoretically good things…but RT-style retweets got popular for a reason.
The ability to add personal commentary to a retweet changes the whole context of the interaction. Sometimes an original tweet only has retweet value when additional commentary is added. Asking a question, adding information, or expressing disagreement in an RT can be a huge conversation-starter. Sometimes it can be difficult to squeeze in extra commentary for longer tweets, but it’s usually easy enough to tweak the original tweet without losing the core message.
Another property of Twitter’s native retweets is that they only appear in the timeline once. The goal of this is to prevent the same tweet from flooding the timeline, but we believe that there’s value in seeing how often a tweet has been retweeted (without having to go back to the first retweet to check). Plus if everyone is adding commentary to the original tweet, each retweet has its own value as well. To make it easier to spot RT’s, we add an icon to each one to improve scanning, and we also provide an RT-only view if you’re just interested in finding recommended tweets.
Finally, the normal behaviour on Twitter.com is to show the avatar of the person being retweeted (with a small “retweeted by X” note underneath). While it’s theoretically nice to attribute the original tweeter by showing their avatar, in practice it’s just plain disorienting to see strangers faces in your timeline. Realistically, when scanning through our Twitter timelines we look for avatars we recognize. Not all recommendations are equal, so being able to easily tell who’s doing the retweeting is much more important than avatar-attribution.
So, with all this in mind, we’ve elected to use RT-style retweets by default in TweetAgora. We’re also turning all new-style retweets into the RT form in your timeline – it’s a more consistent experience than seeing mixed-form retweets, and we believe in the value of letting people add commentary. That said, we added a new feature in v1.2 to deal with retweeting long tweets: if you attempt to retweet a message that goes over 140 characters in RT form, you can choose to send it as a native retweet or to edit the message in RT form. We think it’s the best of both worlds. If you’re still not down with the RT format, we’ve also added a settings option in v1.2 to just always use native retweets.
What do you think? It’s a topic that garnered a lot of discussion when Twitter first rolled out the new style retweets, but it’s certainly still an ongoing issue.
I’m really glad you keep RT-style retweets as the default and change new-style retweets into RT-form. Whenever I try out a new twitter client, that’s the first thing I check. Seeing random strangers in my timeline is a deal-breaker!
That said, I do think it’s smart of you to give people the option of using the new-style retweets for long messages.
The ability to use old style retweets is a make or break for an app for me as I love to get my word in. I do like a tweet-time decision with whether or not I want to just use the old way or the new way.
It’s EXTREMELY annoying in Twitter for iPhone that you cant see who retweeted you with the new RT in your reply timeline. I THINK i’ll be saying something funny, and no RT’s. Then log in to Tweetdeck on my desktop and see many new RTs.
Options are always valued, but I did see a lot of people complain when hootsuite made the default RT the new way.
I agree: I like the RT-style retweets way better. I like the option of adding to the conversation vs. just repeating what’s already been said.
Since all twitter apps now require oauth my old echofon broke, and since they refuse to do oldschool retweets I was looking for someone with your opinion.
I salute your point of view and would have loved to use tweetagora if it wasn’t for the fact I use an Android. But perhaps one day in the future you’ll make an Android version, eh?