Twitter’s new retweet button is getting rolled out slowly… and one of the accounts I use is in the early beta group. So, of course, I played around a little.
There are other posts around the web that explain how the retweet function will work (here’s one from TechCrunch), so I’m just going to focus on my three major reactions up til now.
It is easy enough to retweet, though it takes two clicks instead of one: after you hover over the tweet you want to RT and click on the “Retweet” option (as pictured below), you then get a message asking if you want to retweet to your followers. After you click yes on that second message, the tweet goes out. 
You cannot add commentary to or edit the tweet you’re RTing. Since you now can retweet a full 140 characters, the editing isn’t needed, but the ability to add a comment is often a key part of what makes a RT worth doing. This is a disappointment, indeed, and would lead me to cut and paste quite often.
Finally, I retweeted an @gregpincus tweet… and when I did, I saw that the RT did NOT show up in the @replies column for @gregpincus. In other words, I would not have known that someone had RT’d me had I not done it myself! This seems like a critical oversight… or a terrible problem in the beta.
I rarely use the Twitter.com interface for my tweeting, and so far, the functionality of the Retweet button doesn’t give me a reason to change that. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, though it’s not clear to me why it wasn’t designed to work more like users already do RTing.
Have you had a chance to play? Have you had different reactions? I’d love to hear!
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I don’t like that a retweet will only show up once in your timeline. What if you miss it? kinda limits usefulness. I catch on 2nd, 3rd, even 4th times, sometimes.
I agree with you on that, too. That said, sometimes I’ll see the same RT dozens of times and that can be a bit annoying, too. I’d prefer that, however, or the option of letting ME pick which way I’d like to see them. Seems to me that giving the user freedom woulda been more like how users actually use Twitter.
Thank you for the beta testing and feedback, Greg. I also think it a fail on both counts: unable to edit the RT and not have it show up under @replies.
You mentioned that you don’t use twitter’s web interface much (I think you use Tweetdeck?). I wonder if the twitter RT would show up under @gregpincus over there.
Ugh…I don’t have this function yet, but from your review it sounds like it’s not something I would use until Twitter improved it. Thanks for posting your review!
i liked it, and you can still use the old RT function and do it by hand. However, i hadn’t twigged that it doesn’t show you when you’re RT’d… right now, it’s been suspended, and then the “In Reply To” link disappeared
I feel like i’m tweeting blind
I don’t like it at all. I like commenting on a RT, which this doesn’t allow. I often use “via @username” instead for this reason. And while there is often a lot of RT “noise” with several people RT’ing the same thing, it’s not annoying enough to make me want to limit similar RTs. I typically save an interesting tweet to RT later, for followers who weren’t online during the original tweet.
I noticed the “in reply to” function disappeared. I hope this is just a glitch that’s getting repaired and not a permanent change. Without it, I can’t follow a conversation.