Twitter is rolling out the new Retweet function and my account is one of the beta accounts that was able to test out the new retweet functionality.  First of all, to even know if your account is able to use the new retweet you must use the twitter.com homepage as at the time of this article HootSuite, Twaiter and Tweetdeck don’t yet support the new Twitter Retweet function.

The first thing you will notice is that when you look at someone who you are following you see the new “Retweet” symbol which looks a lot like a recycling symbol.  This symbol indicates you will see all retweets in your timeline from this users.

The next thing you will notice (when the new Twitter Retweet fully rolls out and your account has it) is that there is a new “Retweet” button on each of the tweets in your friends timeline and you hover over it to “reply, DM or fave” but the biggest change will be the new retweet symbol you will see in some of your timeline messages.

Now when somebody retweets a message you will no longer see a RT @username RT @username anymore, instead you will see this retweet symbol and the original persons tweet. No matter how many people retweet the message, the original message will always remain intact and there won’t be any prepended RT @username added to the retweet.

This will start making peoples tweets show up in your friends timeline even if you are not following them, so if one of your friends Retweets one of their followers you will see that persons tweet even if you aren’t following them. This may be confusing at first but if you look at the tweet, there is a new message at the bottom that tells you who the person was who retweeted it that was in your friend list.

These changes are dramatic enough that I think most twitter programs will have to do some serious recoding to figure out how to implement, they will need to add these little retweet logo’s into the tweet stream and have additional options to show who tweeted them. I hope Tweetdeck and Hootsuite will fully support the new Retweet functionality by the time it goes fully public.

I personally think this will be excellent for original tweet creators, their tweets will never be altered when retweeted. This also means though when you retweet an article you are only retweeting the original person who created the tweet, and the other people who retweeted won’t be included as happens with the RT @username RT @username…etc, which may means that you will not likely be as noticed for performing retweets and retweets will truly be more about promoting the original persons tweet instead of tagging long for the ride.

What do you think of the retweet functionality, let me know your opinion.

Twitter recently rolled out a list feature where you can create public or private lists under your profile and add users to your lists. When viewing your list you will only see tweets from people who were added to your list. This works similar to creating groups in TweetDeck or Hootsuite but now this feature is built in by default to Twitter Web Site and it works very well.

Unlike the groups/favorites you set in Twitter Management Programs, your lists can be made public and when public anyone can hit the URL’s and see just what your list network is saying on twitter. Lists make it much easier to segment out your personal and professional twitter affiliations and even allow you to group companies and users into separate categories.

I see lots of potential for this feature, especially once Tweetdeck and Hootsuite update their software to be able to display lists as columns.

-Dragon Blogger

Twitter is enhancing their API to add latitude and longitude to tweets which will allow for geolocation of tweets, this service will open up a slew of potential possibilites including being able to auto follow people in your general area and keeping track of events and who is saying what at those events.  This will make it even easier to have tweetups which are meetup like mixers where local twitter people congregate for lunch or dinner since they all work in the same area.

This may even open up people to finding out they live and work in nearby locations giving rise to increased carpooling possibilities, maybe a carpool type api that finds others in your area looking for a regular carpool.  But this also opens up to advertisers, Imagine companies scanning tweets and based on your location, McDonalds tweeting you an offer to get a Happy Meal a few blocks away, or things as such.  This could be a good thing for both consumers and advertisers in my opinion.

What are your opinions on the geolocation features that Twitter will soon have, do you see a plethora of new services, or will it be a bust?   Leave me a comment if you would, as I am curious to know other twitter user’s opinions on this matter.

I did a search for twitter applications and learned of one called Twimailer, this service will basically server as your twitter email address and send you updates when you get new followers. Instead of the generic twitter messages showing that you have a new follower on twitter, with some information about the number of followers they have, you instead get a full list of information and recent tweets from the person who follows you.

In addition to seeing the number of followers and the last several tweets from your new follower, you are also presented with three options at the end of the email “Follow Back”, “Block User”, or “Report As Spam”, which is also very helpful and saves you time if you want to reciprocate the twitter follow.

No doubt about it, I signed up for the TwiMailer service and it started working within minutes, I now see much more detailed information about the people who follow me and it allows me to craft reply to the user without having to visit their twitter profile to see what they are saying, I have it all handy and right in front of me.

There is no reason that I can see that you shouldn’t use TwiMailer if you use twitter, unless you turn off your follower updates and you just don’t care to get the notifications.

-Dragon Blogger