You’re correct that Twitter has made a small tweak to its interface that some people say is a long time coming: embedding the original tweet when you retweet someone’s message. The benefit, of course, is that you get a lot more space to add your own two cents. In fact, now it might be worth four or even five cents!
It’s a tiny bit confusing, though, because if you retweet something that has an associated photograph or image, that actually vanishes for part of the process, just to reappear at the end of the process.
Let me show you, first with a non-photo tweet being retweeted, then one that includes an image.
To start, here’s an interesting Tweet from the Atomic Heritage Foundation:
To retweet it, I’ll click on the two-arrow “recycle” symbol by the cursor.
You’ve likely done this a few times yourself!
With the new retweet style, it shows up slightly differently:
Here you can see that it’s going to be impossible to monkey with the original tweet. You also don’t have to wyrr about potentially trimming it down because it plus your retweet ends up being just a bit too long.
Click in the comment area and it opens up, ready for you to add almost a full tweet’s worth of info:
Looks good. Click on “Tweet”.
That’s good. That’s kind of the whole point.
Disappointingly, however, the end result is a bit meh:
What happened is that the icon associated with the original Twitter account — @AtomicHeritage — has vanished in the new format, so what started out as a visually interesting tweet is now just a lotta words.
On a tweet with a photo, fortunately, things end up a bit more attractive.
To start, a tweet with a cool visual from the team at ScienceFiction.com:
This time, retweeting it looks distressing free of any images along the way…
But the great news is that when you do retweet it, the image returns (though the icon associated with the Twitter account is again missing in action):
And that’s a pretty nice result.
The post How do I use the new Retweeting format on Twitter? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.
