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.

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.