The Twitter Re-tweet feature started rolling out this week to selected accounts. It’s still in beta and unlike lists, I actually got the chance to see it at the beginning, before any changes occur.
When I first saw the new feature in my stream, I have to say I wasn’t entirely pleased. Tweets started showing up from users that I don’t follow, great more noise. But after reading @Ev’s post on his personal blog, Why Retweet works the way it does, I started to see why it makes sense for them to design it this way.
Ev goes into great detail about the current challenges that  ”organic” re-tweets have. Since re-tweets are something that grew out of the service naturally, there is no standardized way to re-tweet someone. Many have argued over the proper way to do it and some have even written guides on how they think it should be done. The team at Twitter took this and many things into consideration before rolling this new feature out and I have to say I think they did a pretty good job.
Here’s how it works. Once the feature is activated you have the ability to easily re-tweet someones message by clicking the button on a tweet. You are not allowed however, to change any part of the tweet. This helps ensure that attribution and the orgianl message stay intact.
Seeing the original poster of the tweet in your stream doesn’t necessarily create more noise, in fact it is supposed to reduce it. Instead of seeing all 10 of your followers RT the same message, you see it one time from the original poster but with a list of all the people you follow that re-tweeted it below.
This should encourage more people to re-tweet a message and hopefully affect Twitter trends in a more positive way. Right now most of the time the trends mean nothing to me. I don’t really care about things your girlfriend doesn’t do. What I do care about are things that matter and are news worthy.
Currently people use different verbage, different twitter names in a tweet, etc. so it makes it hard to not only see how far you are reaching into the twittersphere, but it then becomes more difficult to trend on a topic. If the original tweet is re-tweeted using this new feature, it should reach farther while staying intact and thus affect the trends.
One of the other great things about using the Twitter RT feature is you gain the ability turn RT’s on and off on a per user basis. So if someone has gone a little RT happy and you just want to see their regular tweets, you can silence them, hooray!
Personally I am enjoying the new feature, I’m sure there are some kinks that will need to be worked out but overall it’s a great experience and was well thought out.
Do you have the re-tweet feature yet? Tell us what you think in the comments.
(The term retweetarrhea is referenced from Evan Williams blog post, Why Retweet works the way it does.)
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