About time? FriendFeed has always kicked Twitter's ass iterating on features, and with access to Facebook's 300 million users this is just "too little, too late" for Twitter.

Why is this such a Big DealTM? @replies becoming a part of the API were a big deal because you could follow the conversation thread using them, RTs don't really have any other context and we're already doing pretty well reposting a tweet with RT <nickname> in front of it.

The only important ramification I can now see is that it will become easier to track what content is being spread from person-to-person without having to rely on searching for "RT" or "via"...

I've seen "retweet storms" where my timeline is clogged with duplicate retweets; hopefully this feature will eliminate that.

It matters for analytics and tools that would like to have a structured wrapper around the data. Also, small changes to @replies like in_reply_to explicitly stated matter a lot for how structured that data is.

Also, number of retweets and likes is more important than number of followers for authority measurement.

The big deal here is that Twitter will get a better idea of what tweets are of "higher quality" or "importance" (both of those terms are questionable). I imagine they'll start bubbling up RT's on some RT or use it for trending.

1. 50% people still probably use web interface, and they don't have easier way of retweeting tweets. They need to copy & paste and that's a big usability hassle.

2. Cleaner stream

3. And other most imp. part - data-mining about finding which activity is retweeted most number of times and discovering popular tweets.

I think it will be neat to see the most retweeted content from your friends and reduce the noise and let people disable it if they like.

That's the sort of thing I'll think we will do on friendbinder with it.

It will mean you can always RT a full tweet, instead of often having to cut off part of it to get it to still fit within 140 characters once you've added the "RT @soandso"

I often like to add a little note to my RT to say what I think about it, hopefully the API is just a flag and I can still do this and be compatible with the system.

The bad: I think it will result in even more retweets. The nice: No duplicate RTs. The good: It will be a lot easier to filter them out completely.

Could someone explain why you would want to retweet? I am not a regular user of twitter, but it would seem to me that retweeting just adds to the noise. Aren't you supposed to tweet original stuff, or is it all about trying to get a topic to trend?

Retweeting is bridging the graph with an enticing edge to follow. If Twitter was a purely social network (without the information flow), the practice would reduce to name-dropping.

To share good content from people you follow to your followers

Often retweets contains links to things that matter, or ideas that should be spread, or funny things. It's the same reason people quote and link on blogs etc.

retweets are a community attempt to make up for the fact that "favoriting" something on twitter is largely ignored and hidden and isn't (or at least wasn't traditionally) something easily accessible from the website or as part of someone's regular list of tweets. Favorites are more accessible now to other people, but they don't have the prominence that they should have.

You retweet because you want to say what someone else said.

With my startup, our stories are retweeted 50-100 times a day. They're retweeted because our followers want to share the news they got from us with their own followers.

Sometimes someone says something that you might agree with, or you think your followers might agree with it, so you RT.

For the same reasons you might link to some other website from your blog, or submit a link here.

Can't they just extract the entire original message for redisplay out of a shorter URL like this: "hey check this out: http://bit.ly/anKad ?

That link ... http://twitter.com/jonpierce/status/3293845360 ... is easy for any client (and twitter) to grep.

Any idea why I would get docked for a comment like this? I thought this might be a solution that required the least amount of work with the greatest possible functionality. I'm not knocking the dock, I'd just like feedback for future posting etiquette. Thanks!