Mashable’s HOW TO: Use Twitter’s New Retweet Feature

Nov 23, 2009 Comments Off by Max

If there is a new feature Mashable is always there to guide us through the changes. Check out the great article at Mashable, The Social Media Guide. How to use Twitter’s New Retweet Feature by Josh Catone.

One of the best things about Twitter is the way that it allows content and information to spread quickly across the network from person-to-person.

This happened for two reasons:

1. because Twitter is a one-to-many communications platform and

2. because it allows for content to be easily repeated.

In fact, the latter led to what we call the “retweet.” It’s safe to say that the founders of Twitter did not initially envision this as a use for their platform, but the retweet convention organized itself organically and was embraced by third-party apps.

Unfortunately, retweets were messy for a couple of ways. First, because of the 140 character limit placed on tweets, retweeting someone else’s content sometimes meant editing their text in order to ensure that the customary “RT” and “@username” attributions fit. Second, because there’s often overlap in who we follow, retweets many times led to redundancy in your timeline as more than one of the people you followed retweeted the same content. So a couple of days ago, Twitter rolled out a solution in the form of a completely new retweet system.