More people are getting the new Twitter retweet function every day now. Personally, I still don’t like it… and those three choices you see at the start of this post are one more reason why.
I had mentioned last time I wrote about the new retweet function, that I noticed that Twitter-based retweets don’t appear in your @mentions columns. Instead, to see them you have to first click on “Retweets” over on the right of your twitter home page (below Favorites). Then you see those three choices.
To see who has retweeted you, you need to pick “Your tweets, retweeted” and look at the small icons that appear under your tweet. You can’t click reply to thank the folks who RT’d you (or continue the conversation with them), though you can get their Twitter IDs by hovering over the icons.
To me, those reply tweets are not “noise,” but instead a key part of the relationship building on Twitter. Now, that process is harder than before, rather than easier.
In the end, I think the theme that keeps coming up for me is that the changes are focused on transmitting information whereas users have been using RTs for many other things… including conversation, relationship building, and showing opinions that differ from the original tweet.
So, for now, I’ll continue retweeting the old-fashioned way (or from Tweetdeck or another third-party app). And you? Is there something here I’m missing? Please let me know!
