As most regular Twitter users know by now, in the second half of last year Twitter added an official retweet to its platform with a reasonable explanation. Its official version essentially adds an unaltered tweet from someone you follow into the timelines of people that follow you, if they do not follow that user already. You can’t edit it.

But a lot of users hate both ends of this addition: they want to add comments to a tweet like the now officially deprecated retweet method, and many don’t even want to see any official retweets in their main timeline at all. They rightly argue they don’t follow those people for a reason, but do follow the people that added comments.

Not everyone hates it, of course, but enough do such that keeping the old retweet alive has caused a terminology problem that is not going away. See above. To even talk about the difference I have to constantly attach a qualifier to “retweet”. Without it you have no idea which one I am referring to. For the record, I prefer the new retweet to the old one, but only because of user icon confusion, seeing one user icon but the tweet of another person next to it.

In the current version of Nambu I offer both options, with a small experiment. I updated Retweet to the official retweet using the new API method, and relabeled the old retweet “Forward”, while not changing its implementation at all. This was largely a failure: Forward means nothing on Twitter and users don’t see it (for the most part) when looking for the “retweet” action option.

To make matters even worse in this regard, some clients offer a Quote Tweet option which uses /via or @via, yet another convention, an updated version of the old retweet that gets rid of the visually horrible RT. Others will name the RT convention something else to differentiate or to avoid two options labeled Retweet (like me earlier this month), or have two options with “Retweet” with different qualifiers like “old”, “traditional” or “RT”. Yuck!

And so I am formally asking Twitter: please, please formalize the terminology around retweets so all clients can implement a common terminology, and standardize it across the platform. The terminology around retweets in the three forms that now exist is a mess. Twitter, please address this, as only you can. Start a small set of implementation guidelines that specify some minimal preferred implementation suggestions and terminology for major features. Any developer that matters will follow them for the benefit of everyone as we all switch from client to client and from device to device.

Twitter needs to show leadership here, and not ignore the issue hoping users let go of RT. They won’t. I even spoke to one user recently that said she will never use the new retweet because she does not want anything but the account’s own image showing up next to whatever she tweets on behalf of clients, period. A lot of people simply hate the new retweet, won’t use it, and nothing can be done about it.

As a client developer without a blessed status within the ecosystem or regular visits to @twitter HQ, I am just a powerless cog in the Twitter machine (as it pertains to Nambu just being a Twitter client), and can do little on my own here. But I do care about the Twitter UX overall, and not just within Nambu. A better Twitter experience based on true attention to detail means more Twitter users for everyone.

But for now I have given up the good fight on this one. In the current development version of Nambu we have already changed the options to “Retweet” and “Traditional Retweet,” while adding a third for “Quote Tweet” with /via or @via. Ugh. The users are left to fend for themselves on this one, but it is not my doing. Let’s solve it, please.

All feedback is welcome. You can follow Nambu at @nambucom and me at @ejwc.