If there is one thing you can say about the people who use Twitter it is that they are a pretty resourceful bunch. When Twitter first started becoming popular – pre Aston and Oprah – Twitter was a pretty barebones service devoid of many features beyond a simple text box to type your message in.
But people wanted to be able to direct replies to other people and thus the ‘@reply’ taxonomy was created and has now spread far and wide beyond Twitter. People wanted to be able to create conversation thread and once again the community came up with the #hashtag idea.
Then there came the point where people wanted to repeat something someone else had said and give them credit for it at which point the idea of the ReTweet was born. In all these cases these ideas very quickly became an integral part of Twitter with all the 3rd party clients incorporating these community created features.
Recently though Twitter, the company, had decided that it was time for them to incorporate the idea of the ReTweet as a core feature of the service. At first everyone was excited and happy with the prospect of this but this pleasure didn’t last long.
You see Twitter in its infinite wisdom had decided to change how the whole ReTweet feature was to work and this pissed off a whole bunch of people on Twitter, myself included, because the changes made no sense at all. After all why totally break something that worked exceedingly well for the most part.
This might not seem like too much of a deal one might think after all this will only apply to the Twitter web interface right? Wrong. Because this is now a core feature of the service all the third party client developers are going to have to switch over to using the ‘official’ ReTweet rather than the much better and more functional community driven version.
They will do this because at some point one of the more popular Twitter clients will switch over and from there every other developer will have to follow suite or be left behind.
Well that point has arrived folks if the news from The Next Web is any indication.
Tweetie 2.1, the latest Tweetie update, is approved and available in the app store.
This update to Tweetie brings lists support, geotagging, native retweets and more.
My only hope is that some developers out there will be willing enough to somehow offer both types of ReTweets but for now it looks like as this uselessness spreads through the Twitter client world it’ll be time to start handcrafting our ReTweets.
I wonder how many other people will be doing the same thing?
