Twitter is in the process of adding an official ‘retweet’ option to its service.

It’s very early days yet - most people haven’t received the option, including some in the 33 office - but it’s already created a lot of debate (TechCrunch and PC Mag for example) because it’s fundamentally different from the organic way that the community has popularised retweets

How-to retweet (before and after)

Originally, a manual retweet or one by a Twitter client, will copy the whole tweet and add the phrase “RT @name” at the beginning of the tweet*. They also let you add commentary to the tweet if you’d like to add your own perspective.

The new approach won’t let you edit a Tweet. Instead, the whole message will be pushed verbatim into your follower’s stream.

The original approach won’t be outlawed but is likely to shrink or disappear as more clients adopt the new feature.

Why is retweet being changed?

There are many reasons that Ev Williams explains on his blog but here are a couple:

1. To reduce noise, you’ll only ever see a retweeted message once. This will keep your stream a little quieter, but sounds like it will have a negative impact on the way we currently gauge the importance of a message that is popular and being retweeted. Noise can be distracting but in case of breaking events, it can also be an important sign to take notice.

2. You’ll be able to hide retweets from people. For example, if I only wanted to see Dom’s personally authored tweets then I could hide his retweets.

Our initial reaction…

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