I’d like to add a little further add to my previous post on the old retweet.  Frankly, I think the old retweet sucks.  And I think those that argue that the new version doesn’t allow for commentary are right, but wrong that the old solution is at all a good way to go about providing that commentary.

I’d say that in 90% of cases, a tweet is too long for someone to retweet and be able to provide any kind of additional comment that creates value.  So what do you do? You either alter the tweet to make it shorter so you can add what you want or you say something brilliant like “agree” or “wow”.

In the first situation you’re changing someone’s message.  You are altering what they had to say, making it hard for your followers to REALLY know what they said.  Someone could easily alter that message in a way that benefits their comment and it would be immediately apparent.  The only way to get the original message is to go to that person’s profile and find it, which is way more work than just including the link to the tweet.

In the second case, your commentary is not very valuable.  Your users might know how you stand on the subject, but that’s about the best you can do.  There’s very little being added to the discussion.

This is why I like the solution I provided.  It gives you plenty of space for commentary, while making it pretty simple to get to the pure, unaltered, original content.