Today during my purge of old website accounts and/or adjusting their profiles, I came across on Disqus an old comment of mine on a Mashable story from when Twitter announced they were going to make retweets a built-in function.
Unfortunately they’ve both over-thought it and didn’t think it through enough. Their “solution” is more database intensive than just coding a way to ape the way people already do it by hand (“RT @-username [original tweet text]”), and database traffic isn’t what Twitter needs more of, given their stability as it is.
What’s more, they fundamentally misconstrue how many people use retweeting – which is not just to pass along the original tweet but often, if there’s room, to comment on it as well. This “solution” renders that impossible.
Much like the asinine “users are too confused by the option to see all replies” debacle, Twitter’s only showing that it once again fails to understand how people are actually using their service.