Twitter issues mulligan on new 'retweet' feature

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.

The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."

"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."

But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.

[Shadowbat]

The good was that a retweet would show the avatar of the original author, not the one repeating it. You couldn't change the original message either so no more counterfeit retweets. The bad was you couldn't add your own comment. The novelty wore off for me after the first 30 seconds of usage.

[Nicole Lee]

You know what will alienate new Twitter users? Jargon words like "RT". Better for Twitter to integrate retweeting in a clearer, easier, more understandable fashion (Twitter did go out of their way to very cleverly illustrate the retweeting feature with handy javascript hover-over explanations). Also, "RT" adds on to the already precious 140-character confines of the message.

[cwallstar]

Thank you! It took me a good 2 or 3 weeks of using Twitter to finally cave and ask what the hell "RT" meant. I think the new retweet feature is a great idea and should go over well in the long run.

[Thought Nozzle]

If I'm unable to add a comment to a retweet, the feature is virtually worthless to me. I can, in a way, understand that twitter would want to maintain the integrity of the original tweet, but there are ways to do that and allow commenting at the same time. If a retweet is going to be cleared marked as one, why not either allow pre-pending a comment (depending on the length of the original tweet) with some kind of demarkation between the two? Or, somehow pair the RT with a regular tweet? Otherwise, I'll still be sticking RT in and doing them manually.