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Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

Why is this such a Big DealTM? @replies becoming a part of the API were a big deal because you could follow the conversation thread using them, RTs don't really have any other context and we're already doing pretty well reposting a tweet with RT <nickname> in front of it.

The only important ramification I can now see is that it will become easier to track what content is being spread from person-to-person without having to rely on searching for "RT" or "via"...

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I've seen "retweet storms" where my timeline is clogged with duplicate retweets; hopefully this feature will eliminate that.

It matters for analytics and tools that would like to have a structured wrapper around the data. Also, small changes to @replies like in_reply_to explicitly stated matter a lot for how structured that data is.

Also, number of retweets and likes is more important than number of followers for authority measurement.

The big deal here is that Twitter will get a better idea of what tweets are of "higher quality" or "importance" (both of those terms are questionable). I imagine they'll start bubbling up RT's on some RT or use it for trending.

1. 50% people still probably use web interface, and they don't have easier way of retweeting tweets. They need to copy & paste and that's a big usability hassle.

2. Cleaner stream

3. And other most imp. part - data-mining about finding which activity is retweeted most number of times and discovering popular tweets.

I think it will be neat to see the most retweeted content from your friends and reduce the noise and let people disable it if they like.

That's the sort of thing I'll think we will do on friendbinder with it.

It will mean you can always RT a full tweet, instead of often having to cut off part of it to get it to still fit within 140 characters once you've added the "RT @soandso"

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