Twitter Launches ‘Retweet With Comment’ Feature

Twitter has now fully launched its “retweet with comment” feature on its website and iPhone app, with availability on its Android app coming soon. Now, when a user clicks on the retweet button and chooses the “quote tweet” option, the original tweet is posted as a “card,” showing a small version of it in the stream and using up much less of the 140 available characters. The quoted tweet still takes up some of the space, so users will have 116 characters to use for their comments, which is still significantly more than would have typically been available in the past.

Before Twitter launched this new feature, adding a comment when retweeting was a more tedious process. Users had to either manually copy and paste the link into a new tweet, or copy and paste a tweet’s original text into a new tweet with a comment added, but they had to stay within a total of 140 characters. With the new feature, users are able to share and comment on other’s tweets without the need to eliminate a part of the original tweet.

The “retweet with comment” feature serves a significant purpose. By allowing users to share and comment on tweets without the need to shorten the original tweet, the full context and meaning can be preserved.

Certainly, the 140 character limit is what Twitter was initially based on, but many influential users have been coming up with ways to get around the limit in order to use Twitter as their main public communication platform. For example, posting screenshots of quotes from articles has become a popular method for including more text in a tweet. This concept even inspired an app called OneShot, created by a former VP of product at Twitter, which made it easier to share screenshots of text to Twitter.

Another method for getting around Twitter’s character limit is what is known as “tweetstorms.” The idea is to begin a tweet with a simple “1/,” and then to continue posting subsequent tweets starting with “2/” and so on, up to as many as 10 or 15 tweets that are posted in rapid succession, and together make up a much longer amount of text. Although some users seem to enjoy this idea, there are others who find it confusing, as it’s easy to miss some of the subsequent tweets, and it really isn’t anywhere near the way that Twitter was intended to be used.

Twitter’s new “retweet with comment” feature illustrates the platform’s evolution to move beyond its original concept, allowing users to express themselves in more detail now than in the past. Although many people have already been devising ways to get around the 140 character limit, the new feature provides an official method for posting longer retweets on the platform.