TweetDeck Integrates New RT Feature: Pluses and Minuses

Tweet­Deck relea­sed ver­sion 0.32.0 today, a desk­top appli­ca­tion update that inc­lu­des the new Twit­ter ret­weet fea­ture. On the plus side, Tweet­Deck makes it easy to choose bet­ween sen­ding an edi­ted ret­weet and a new ret­weet. On the nega­tive side, Tweet­Deck does not bump a tweet if you are already follo­wing a per­son who has been retweeted.

The deve­lo­pers thought first of the account hol­der author: when you click the Tweet­Deck ret­weet icon, Tweet­Deck asks you if you want to just ret­weet (the new fea­ture) or “edit then ret­weet.” If you change your mind, you must make the second choice, then highlight/delete. And you can make this deci­sion per­ma­nent in settings.

Howe­ver, unlike Twee­te­la­tor (iPhone only), Tweet­Deck does not “bump” the new ret­weet. Why is this a big deal? As I wrote two weeks ago:

One of the advan­ta­ges (to the ori­gi­nal author) of RTs is that each beco­mes a new tweet, a new ins­tance. This inc­rea­ses the chance that someone will “see” the ori­gi­nal tweet.

Think of a ret­weet as “bum­ping” an item “up” in time. But that’s not how the new Twitter.com inter­face works. On low volume accounts, this isn’t a big issue. But on mode­rate– to high-volume accounts (mea­su­red by num­ber follo­wed), it is. Here’s why.

Twit­ter doesn’t “bump” the old tweet — it merely chan­ges the “ret­wee­ted by” count. So if you read your Tweets on theTwitter.com site and mis­sed a tweet the first time around, you’ll miss it each-and-every time it’s ret­wee­ted … because it will remain in “his­tory,” far below the fold.

Tweet­Deck desk­top does, howe­ver, flag a new ret­weet and does so in a way that pro­vi­des more visual infor­ma­tion to the rea­der than the Twit­ter web inter­face. Note that the times­tamp is that of the ori­gi­nal tweet, not the ret­weet, which looks very odd in your timeline.

Tweet­Deck is follo­wing the para­digm esta­blished by Twit­ter. If you are rea­ding Twit­ter via the web inter­face, you’ll find that Twit­ter does not “bump” a tweet if you are already follo­wing someone who has been ret­wee­ted since you read the ori­gi­nal tweet. Moreo­ver, because that Tweet is “in his­tory” (so to speak), that tweet will never show that it has been ret­wee­ted. This over­sight remains a fatal flaw in this sys­tem, in my opinion.

This post first appea­red at Wired­Pen