Slowly but surely, Twitter is adding users to its beta Retweet feature. The way it works is straightforward: when you’re using Twitter.com (as opposed to a client like Tweetdeck, Nambu or Hootsuite), you get to see a “Retweet” link when you roll over someone’s tweet:
Click it, and a little confirmation button appears:
Click that, and you automatically retweet. The original tweet now has a link that allows you to undo your retweet:
Why would you want to do that (other than spite)? Well, the feature isn’t that smart about telling you that your retweet exceeds 140 characters – which it often will, because you’re adding “RT (@username)” at the beginning of it. And you may realize you want to add a little something yourself, like “Not sure if I agree” or “N.B.: PDF link”, or edit the retweet down to the one thing you really want to highlight.
I’m not sure how useful this will be to me. But it’s live now, and you can expect to see a lot more retweeting pretty soon… and a lot more truncated tweets until people do a quick character count before clicking.
