Sometimes I swear the geniuses at Facebook and Twitter are in competition to see who can be the most tone deaf to their users. Twitter has just taken a giant leap ahead with their new retweet feature.

In an earlier post explaining how to retweet, I said I was baffled by Twitter's lack of an option to make retweeting easier. All they needed to do was add an icon, like the one to reply to a tweet, that would copy the tweet into the text box with the "RT @[USERNAME]" automatically added to the front of it, (Many third-party apps like TweetDeck do that now).

THAT'S ALL THEY NEEDED TO DO.

Instead they decided to completely change the way retweeting works. (You may not see it yet because it's still in beta and they're rolling it out in stages.) I guess I should count my blessings that they did, at least, add a single click way to retweet. So the problem isn't on the sending side—it's on the receiving side. Here's a picture of what the new retweeted tweet looks like.

So what's the problem with this? Here are the three biggies:

• In the original model, you would see the picture of the person retweeting the post, which tells you that you might be interested in it (assuming you're interested in what the people you're following are saying). Now, you see the picture of the person who wrote the tweet in the first place, who may not be someone you follow, or even anyone you've ever heard of before.

  In typical "we know better what you want than you do" fashion, Twitter CEO Ev Stone explains the wonderful benefits of the new system.

  The drawback is that it may be a little surprising (unpleasant even, for some) to discover avatars of people they don't follow in their timeline. I ask those people to keep in mind the following: You're already reading the content from these people via organic retweets. This is just giving you more context. My experience is that you get used to this pretty quickly, and it's a welcome way to mix things up.

• To find out who actually retweeted it, you have to look at the tiny type BELOW the tweet. I don't know about you, but I tend to scroll through my tweets and, when I see one from a friend who I know posts cool stuff, it catches my attention. Now I'm very likely to just miss interesting content because my friends' names won't be jumping out at me. Likewise, it won't be so obvious to my followers when I'm sending on interesting/funny/moronic posts.
• You can't add anything to the tweet before you send it—it goes out the instant you click the link. No "Couldn't agree more", "Very cool." no "WTF?" It's often those little additions—even a simple "LOL"—that lets you know WHY your friend is retweeting it in the first place. Why would Twitter think restricting people from writing something on Twitter would be a good idea?

I just got added to the beta today, so there may very well be even more badness to this that I have yet to discover. But those three things are enough to convince me to not use the new retweet link myself. For the time being, at least, cutting and pasting the tweet and adding the RT code will still work. And I'm not sure what's going to happen with third-party apps. At the moment, TweetDeck, which I use, hasn't changed the way their retweets work.

If you've been added to the new system, what do you think about it? Love it? Hate it? Doesn't make a difference one way or the other? Add your comments below.

Posted in My Two Cents, Social Media, Twitter, User Interface