Twitter to adopt RTing...and not in a good way

[QuirkyJessi]

Twitter to Officially Adopt ReTweeting (And You Might Not Like It) - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

At least some people are complaining about how they're adopting it. Retweeting is something that users "invented" and ran with on their own. Twitter is going to add it as an actual feature now, but check out how they're doing it. You might hate it, too:

The ReTweet will appear as a regular Tweet, with the avatar of the original Tweeter and everything but underneath, it will say "ReTweeted by so and so" in tiny text.

The Twitter blog has a sketch to go along with it, too.

Twitter Blog: Project Retweet: Phase One

Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You'd see @ev's tweet even though you don't follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (The star, reply, and retweet options only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don't see them all the time.) Also, if you find my retweets annoying, then you'll be able to turn them off.

Notice that you'll be able to turn off people's RTs, too.

For those who are still using Twitter full-force, what do you think?

[BecomeYoung]

Why is this not a positive thing? Twitter needs to incorporate more of these features, instead of people tacking them on with weird keywords and symbols.

[QuirkyJessi]

No, it's *great* that they're incorporating features like that, especially when so many third party apps already include it. It's not so good that instead of keeping the RTs as showing from the person who is RTing them....they're going to be throwing in people's avys and such into your feed that you're not connected to whenever a friend of your RTs them, with just a notation of who RTed.

[BecomeYoung]

Makes Twitter a little more social, I think, but YMMV. I can't make a complete judgment until the change is actually rolled out, but I think it'll be a net positive.