Twitter has rolled out a revamped retweet feature, allowing users to post comments on other people’s tweets without having to shorten the original post.
If the above statement is a bit confusing, that’s because I tried, and most likely failed, to explain a somewhat complex feature with a single sentence.
So let’s break it down: Twitter only allows 140 characters per post. If someone wanted to retweet another person’s post and leave their own comment or opinion of it, they had to shorten the original post as much as possible to make room for their own words.
Or they could post a link to the original comment, but even that wasn’t a quality solution.
For Twitter, that was obviously the problem, because shortening someone’s original statement means risking changing its entire context, and people were struggling, going out of their way to do something as simple as posting a comment on someone’s tweet. It simply wasn’t seamless enough.
That’s why the company started testing a "retweet with comment" feature last summer, which would help solve this problem, without abandoning the 140 character limit.
Now it’s live, and it works very simple: the original comment gets embedded and isn’t even recognized as text, leaving the commenter the full 140 characters to say whatever he or she wants to say.
The feature is now available on Twitter’s site and iPhone app and will be available on its Android app soon.
Some people think the feature is great, others that it’s ugly, but nevertheless, it will most definitely be useful.
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