More and more users are getting Twitter’s new Retweet feature. Beta users see a banner at the top of the home page indicating they are part of the rollout:

A Retweet carries the new Retweet double-arrow icon and a count of how many times it has been retweeted.

When a user clicks “Retweet,” all formatting is handled by Twitter, and the Retweet is published without opportunity for editing. This overcomes a serious drawback of “informal” retweets, which is that users could edit them, or completely fabricate them, violating the integrity of the original tweet and/or attributing things to people who did not tweet them in the first place. This was previously a big problem.

I also noticed that tweets by people who have protected updates cannot be retweeted. Smart.

A Retweet can’t be deleted, but it can be undone. A Retweet does not become a new tweet on your timeline. The original tweet remains intact and the fact you retweeted is added to the original. Retweets therefore don’t affect character count, so 140-character tweets will Retweet with no lost characters.

Tags: Twitter, retweet