Perhaps I’m just annoyed that Twitter is making me rewrite chunks of code from my Twitter research toolkit (soon to be released open source!), but I don’t like how Twitter implemented retweeting. Not one bit.

By sticking the original tweet right into your stream, Twitter has shifted the focus away from the retweeter. As a consumer, this means I can’t scan through tweets looking at authors to decide what’s worth reading—if one of my favorite users retweets, I won’t know it unless I stop to read the 9pt text telling me who the retweeter was. As a producer, this means I won’t get as much kudos for my retweets.

From a research perspective, formalized retweeting is great—it makes it ridiculously easy to see how tweets travel through the social graph. But users aren’t going to like it, and the practice of retweeting is going to change significantly, possibly for the worst.