Twitter’s New Retweet Experience Beta

I just logged into twitter and was greeted with this graphic informing me that I’m part of the Beta group for a new retweeting experience.

It looks like Twitter is trying to clean up how retweets are displayed by linking to the original tweet, and simply placing the original tweet in the stream of your followers.

This seems cool because it might help with nested retweets by allocating all retweets to the original user, and when you find something that has been retweeted interesting you’ll be able to link back to the user that originally made the tweet without any hassle. Then you’ll be able to check out their page/bio and decide if you want to follow them. Another cool thing about this is that I don’t believe Twitter created the notion of retweeting (I’m not sure) but it’s cool to see the service embrace a standard originated from within the community.

The biggest downside to this (aside from the fact that I don’t retweet very often) is that this graphic tells me nothing about how to use this new retweet feature. Do I still just copy and paste the tweet prefaced by RT? Can I just type RT @mager to just retweet @mager’s most recent tweet? (That would be an awesome feature by the way).

I think Twitter just made it even easier for tweets to become viral, but I wonder how many people might not even notice this feature because they consume their tweets using third party clients rather than the Twitter web interface.

[updated]

I found the first retweet to show up in my timeline. Rather than showing up as a tweet from a user I follow it shows up as the tweet from the original user with their user name and icon with a little note telling me which user I follow retweeted it. This is pretty much what I expected, and it will be nice because rather than having tweets from 5 different users retweeting the same thing, I will just see the original tweet with a message saying it was retweeted by those 5 people I follow. This means Twitter has a great way to tell exactly how popular a specific tweet is, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that ability involved in a future business/revenue move in the near future.

Another downside I’ve realized is that you can’t add your own thoughts or a comment about a retweet.  It looks like you have to follow up with another tweet if you want to comment about what you just retweeted.  Now I’m envisioning tweet pages with hundreds of comments about 140 character messages that spark huge debates…