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Twitter, the service everyone either loves or hates, has a history of learning from its users and adding new features based on how they use the service.  Neither @replies or hashtags were implemented in the original version of Twitter, but as people started using them they were added as official features.  Now, another popular features, retweeting, is set to get its own official method.

Retweeting is the process of reposting what someone else said on Twitter; it’s usually done by adding RT @(name) to the start of the tweet, or maybe sometimes by adding (via @(name)) to the end of a tweet.  There’s really no official way of doing it, but RT seems to be the most common way of doing it.  Twitter looks to change that by adding its own method of retweeting.  The new method would give each message a “retweet” option on the website, and would then essentially forward that message to everyone that follows you.  Instead of seeing the retweeters name, you’d see the name of the original person, with a small attribution to who retweeted it below, like shown in the image above.

While the idea is good, the implementation seems a bit off.  Having a unified way of retweeting is great, but seeing the original message rather than the name of the one who retweeted it can be annoying.  It would make users like Tweetmeme who simply retweet popular items confusing if the client you use doesn’t implement the API in an effective way.  Users also can’t add their own commentary to the tweets, which is occasionally more interesting than what was being retweeted.  Perhaps Twitter can solve these issues, but for now it’s tentatively a good thing.

Read [CNet News]