Twitter's 'retweet' button disappears - but unfortunately not for long

Twitter rough for retweet function
How Twitter roughed out the idea for the 'retweet' function. Not shown: annoyed users.

Twitter's "retweet" function has temporarily disappeared - which one might hope means that the company's great worked-out-on-a-napkin experiment, which aimed to take the effort out of mouthing someone else's pearls of wisdom, has died a rapid death.

Sadly not: according to NextWeb, it's simply been taken down for a bug fix. Damn - we had hoped that it might have realised that the bug was in the function, not the code.

Why? "Retweeting" usually involves seeing something that someone you follow says, and then copying it into your stream of consciousness*. Before Twitter introduced a "function" for doing so, this meant laborious use of the "copy" and "paste" function, imposing nearly two seconds' brain effort on time-harried social media experts.

But it also meant that those who thought about what they were working with could add their own comments, by quoting the tweet and adding their own thoughts to them.

The fact that automated retweeting (rhymes with "bleating") wasn't popular, despite having been dreamed up inside Twitter, surfaced pretty quickly after its introduction in November:

he new system is not without hitches. The biggest one is that the retweeted messages now appear under the original Twitterer's name and picture, so your followers might have difficulties recognising who the sender is and wonder who these strange tweeters are in their twitter stream. Secondly, you can't add your own comment anymore, so on the website mini-editorialisation is over for now.

Lisa Barone put it rather acutely: the retweet function, she said, is

jarring. To suddenly see someone you don't know in your sacred space. That's how I feel about the new Retweet Feature on Twitter. Not because I'm having a "Facebook moment" where change freaks me out, but because they just ruined and violated some of the core ways people use Twitter. The ones users had created themselves.

Evan Williams insisted there was a sensible reason why retweet (the function) worked differently from retweet (the human-powered form).

What we're hoping now (even so) is that Twitter has seen the light and gotten rid of it.

Because if it has gone back on its attempt to roll out an unpopular update due to user backlash, there might be a chance that it would go back on its bad decision from May when replies you made to particular followers stopped being visible to all your followers. Though that had been an option (either to see all of peoples' replies, or only to see those to people you also followed), Twitter forced the latter scenario on them. Damn. Fix replies, not retweets!

* used loosely

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