Screenshots from Twitter’s RETWEET invite only beta group
So Twitter very kindly identified Fund it Frog (@FunditFrog) as an organisation that they would like to test the new limited release RETWEET functionality. (Why? It’s not the volume of tweets or followers, but it may be the regularity. I suspect the real reason is because we use so many different third party apps to update our twitterstream. Enough guesswork, let’s look at the screenshots.
Invitation to join the beta test
Close-up of the invitation
Mouseover reveals twitter retweet options
Confirmation dialogue (that could become annoying!)
Twitter retweet screenshot - New retweet styling for those invited to the beta trial
Notice that the letters RT have disappeared - replaced by a very web2.0 icon. Wow!
Interestingly, for those people not included in the trial, they still see the old fashioned letters, “RT”. Here’s a view from an account in that class that i made earlier (haha) – my Social Media Guy accout (@hyuz):
A view of the FunditFrog retweet from an old style user's account
Analysis? Let’s keep it simple: It removes the shouty clutter of the capital letters of RT that obscure the content itself. It works, and well. I like it. Do you? Comments welcome below.
UPDATE! If you do a search on http://twitter.com/#search?q=RT You have a proxy for things other people find interesting. If you remove the text RT from the retweet mechanism, that proxy may disappear. Actually quite a sever limitation. At the moment it still appears to work even if you are participating in the beta, but in the future? Thoughts?
Social Media Guy's blog 
I’m not sold on it. Two things I dislike – first, it doesn’t seem to work with any of the clients (Tweetdeck, etc.). Presumably that’s fixable.
Second, and more importantly, it doesn’t allow for comments. A lot of people will add their own remark on top of a retweet, giving it a personal nuance.
I can see what Twitter is trying to do. They have made it so that a comment can be retweeted indefinitely while preserving references to all the people who have retweeted it — no longer limiting it to as many references as will fit in a 140 character limit.
However, I think they’ve fixed something that was never broken. The community developed RT and it was working pretty well. I think including the functionality and adding an icon replacing ‘RT’ would have been mostly good enough.
If Twitter does want to flex some engineering muscle – I wish they’d handle the issue of conversation threads and @replies. This is where a clever approach to picking up an entire discussion would come in handy.
But enhancing Retweets? I just wonder why they felt they needed to.
I agree with Kai – don’t try and fix something that’s not broken… http://www.dannywhatmough.com/2009/11/11/is-twitter-opening-a-can-of-worms-with-the-rt-change/