Twitter is different from every other social network because it limits users to 140-characters. A tweet can’t have more than that, and mind you, that’s 140-characters, not alphabets, so brevity is its salient feature. The Retweet feature is a core part of the Twitter experience as it allows users to re-post another user’s tweet on their timeline, its one of the ways news spreads like fire on the microblogging network. Now it looks like the feature might be changed a bit and it may very well be a welcome change.
One way to take part in a conversation on Twitter is to quote a tweet. What this does is that it adds quotation marks around the original tweet and lets you add in your two-cents. But the problem with this is that the original person’s tweet goes toward your 140-character limit, so if their tweet is already on the limit, you may have to trim it down yourself before saying what you want to say.
Twitter is reportedly experimenting with a new feature called “Retweet with comment.” Basically it wouldn’t quote a tweet so users will be able to utilize the full 140-characters that they’re entitled to, while also being able to chime in on someone else’s tweet. It can be seen in the screenshots that the retweet is actually displayed as a separate card beneath whatever comment a user adds on it.
Apparently this feature is only being tested with a select base of Twitter users at this point in time. Twitter does this a lot to gauge what the public’s response might be if the feature were to go live for everyone. It is unclear when Retweet with comment is going to go live, but I’ll certainly be waiting for it.
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