UPDATE 2010-05-25: Twitter seems to have disabled this feature, so you can’t disable/enable retweets on an individual level.

As you may have seen my Twitter account now has access to the new retweet feature.

The first (and, in all likelihood, last) post that I ever retweeted was this one from @superfantastic:

My nephew gets candy for going pee pee on the potty. I went pee pee on the potty and I didn’t get anything. Being a grown up is bullshit.

I chose to retweet this largely as an experiment. It’s a good candidate for retweeting, because it made me laugh, but at 137 characters, it is too long for a “traditional” retweet.

RT @superfantastic: My nephew gets candy for going pee pee on the potty. I went pee pee on the potty and I didn’t get anything. Being a grown up is bullshit.

is 17 characters too long, which usually leads people to start “abbreviating” things, like so:

RT @superfantastic: My nephew got candy for peeing on the potty. I pee on the potty and I didn’t get anything. Being a grown up is bullshit.

140 characters, but I’ve mangled it. Those who have seen mangled retweets know that it is usually a lot worse:

RT @superfantastic: My nephew pee on da potty, got candy. I pee on the potty & I didnt get nothin. Being a grown up is bullshit // TRUE DAT

With the hard limit of 140 characters, adding the “RT @username” almost always led to truncating.

Now there’s no need for truncating.

This is especially true of some “bots” which retweet and often mangle/truncate a joke, cutting off the punchline.

“But…”

The biggest complaints I’ve seen about the new Retweet format comes down are:

1. Can’t add your own comment

2. The icon of the original person will show up in your friends’ timelines.

The second point famously led Justine Bateman to go over the batshit crazy cliff, claiming that someone had hacked into her Twitter account or some such nonsense.

Personally, I like the fact that people can’t edit it. I’ve had tweets edited to where they no longer said what I had said.

The icon thing… well, people will get used to it. Twitter clients will have to figure out a way to show you who retweeted it.

But my hope is that this will make people pause and think “Do I want to retweet this? Is this going to confuse people? Maybe I should skip it…”

There Are Benefits

1) You’ll only see one retweet per tweet in your timeline.

Imagine you follow Sam, Joe, Sally, and Jane.

Sam posts something to Twitter which Joe, Sally, and Jane all retweet. You will only see the first retweet. (Unfortunately you will still see it even if you already follow Sam.)

Under the old method, you might see it four times. Now you shouldn’t see it more than once. This is a good thing.

2) If someone stars a retweet, the star goes to the original person.

This gives really popular people the ability to retweet lesser-known people and give them exposure. Their icons will show up in others’ timelines, and stars will be given out accordingly. (Of course most webcocks want people with 100 followers to retweet them instead of the other way around.)

3) Delete the head and the tail disappears

A few months ago there was a “missing child” alert which went out through Twitter and which was retweeted widely. The child (teenager) was then found.

If the new method of retweeting is used, the parent could then delete the original “Missing!” report and all of the retweets would disappear too. I consider this a good thing also.

(You can also choose to “un-retweet” something, but of course if people have already seen it, it’s a little late.)

4) You can now turn off retweets

Let me say that again

You can now turn off retweets

There’s good news and bad news here. First the good news: Got someone you follow who retweets too much? Before you would have had to unfollow them. Now you can simply go to their Twitter page and click the Retweet icon next to the “Following” (see picture, above).

The bad news? You have to do this for each person. You can’t set a global preference to never see retweets. That should be an option, IMO, but it isn’t. (Yet?)

If you hated retweets before this, the new feature won’t change your mind

Personally I don’t care for retweets, but they’re apparently here to stay. Twitter saw that and tried to make them work better. They are responding to the way that people use the site. The fact that I don’t like that people use it this way is unfortunate, but I’m in the minority of Twitter users overall.

To say that “no one asked for this” is wrong, because every time someone retweeted someone else, they said (in effect) this is a habit of Twitter users.

Overall, I think it’s hard to argue that this isn’t an improvement. Yes, it will take some time before people get used to seeing strangers in their timelines, but my guess is that it won’t take long. I doubt people who didn’t retweet before will start retweeting now, and since you can turn them off now, you can previously follow people who did retweet too much beforehand.

Summary?

I still don’t like retweets in general, but I like the changes that Twitter made.