There’s been a ton of backlash with Twitter’s new retweet functionality.  Most of the complaint is directed toward the fact that, when you use the new retweet, you can’t comment on what you’re sharing.  There are also complaints that seeing a tweet in your timeline from someone you aren’t following is confusing.  And some users don’t like that they no longer have the metric of looking at their mentions and seeing how many times a tweet was retweeted (something I think will be resolved before long by Twitter).

Conversely, it’s clear that the new retweet has a lot of value for Twitter.  It allows them to really see how much a specific tweet was shared and has the potential to give them a way to rank tweets by their value.  There’s still a long way to go in making it happen, but, in my opinion, it’s really hard to argue that the new retweet isn’t good for Twitter and for users.

However there is the important issue of commentary.  Being able to comment on something you’re sharing can often be crucial.  But it’s not a simple problem to solve.  If you just add the commentary to the new retweets you could get a long unmanageable stream of comments in addition to every tweet, completely defeating the biggest value Twitter brings: simplicity.

So what should Twitter do?  No surprise, I have a suggestion.  First I think they should acquire some short Twitter-esque domain (like http://tw.tr or something along those lines) and make that, through a partnership with bit.ly, the official domain for links to tweets.  Then add some sort of functionality, keeping it simple I would just call it comment.

When a user clicked the comment button on the web, the short link to that tweet would be pasted in their box giving them plenty of room for commentary.  For third party applications, Twitter could work some magic to make it really easy to make API calls via that link so that apps could show the tweet just the way the show any other individual tweet.

They would then have analytics they could use to assign value to a tweet as well as the commentary that makes Twitter great.  This would also make viewing an individual tweet more interesting.  When you go to the web page for that tweet, below it you could see all of the users who have commented on it (possibly even ranked by value due to the new retweet strategy).

I might try to make a few mockups of the idea.  I’d love to know what you think of this strategy for improving the functionality of retweets.  Like it? Have ideas to make it better?? Thank it’s complete horse crap? Let me know.