Retweet? No thanks.

Twitter means different things to different people, I have no problem with that. This is not going to be one of those ‘You Just Don’t Get It Do You? 10 Ways You’re Tweeting It Wrong’ type of posts.

For me, Twitter is about conversation. Retweets are part of that – and something that I’m a big fan of, so it was good to see them finally appear at Twitter.com. However, I don’t use the web-based version of Twitter much, so I didn’t play around with the new retweet function until last week. Sadly, I soon learned that whilst Twitter’s version of retweeting may fit their business model, it doesn’t work for me.

In an offline conversation, if I repeat something interesting that I’ve been told, I don’t necessarily do it verbatim, I’m able to add my own comments if I want to. If I retweet via a Twitter client (such as Tweetdeck) I can do that online too, but I quickly discovered that Twitter’s own retweet function is exactly that – a verbatim retweet. There’s no opportunity to add anything. That’s not facilitating a conversation, so personally I’m not interested.

I just hope that as Twitter develops their new retweet function, they don’t end up affecting the ability of the rest of us to RT in whatever fashion we choose.