by @geekgirls

UPDATE: Twitter’s New RT (retweet) feature has been disabled. According to http://status.twitter.com as of November 11th 2009:

We’re working on a few problems related to the ongoing rollout. These should be resolved quickly and it will be back on for those who had the Retweet feature previously. And we’ll then continue the incremental rollout of this feature to everyone.

 

Earlier this evening, along with the help of TONS of my peeps, I was able to test the new automatic RT (re-tweet) button on Twitter.

In your feed, there is a new clickable button next to the Reply button. Click the Retweet and the tweet will automatically be retweeted. It appears that the new RT feature has not rolled out for everyone just yet, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see it when you log in.

To make this short and sweet, here’s the skinny on the new automatic RT button:

• The RT button only exists on Twitter itself. Third party Twitter clients (ie TweetDeck and Seesmic) have not integrated this new feature. Please note: If you use the RT button on Twitter, those re-tweets will NOT appear in any of the third party clients.

• It appears that you can RT any message in its entirety, including the originators name, regardless of character length. So technically, your RT could be 155 characters in length with no disruption to the message.

• I know most of us like to add captions or even disclaimers to retweets, but unfortunately, there is no way to edit the automatic RT.

• There is an “Undo” button to remove any unwanted retweets.

• All of your followers will be able to read all your RTs, regardless of their follow status with the originator of the tweet.

• If you retweet using this new feature, the message will be preceeded by rather than the “RT” initials.

• These new RTs will not show up in your personal feed. To review what you have reposted, you have to either check your profile page or click on the new right-column category titled “ReTweets”.
  This page is divided into 3 tabs: Retweets by Others , Retweets by You, and Your Tweets, Retweeted. I suspect this may become quite cumbersome to continually monitor.

• The RT feature only allows for one use. Although I’m not certain that you would need to retweet the same message more than once, if you wanted to, you can’t.

So there is it. Not at all as bad as the media had led me to initially believe. I think with addition of an edit function, Twitter will have finally caught up to its third party applications.

Your thoughts ??