Its my right to comment on a RT Godammit!

So, installed the latest edition of Tweetdeck yesterday, and soon after shot off a RT (re-twt) on some matter, with my usual < comment attached here. The RT pops up with my comment lots. TRy again - same effect. Ah - clearly, Tweetdeck has implemented the "helpful" new Twitter facility where only the pristine original can be passed on.

I really, really, really don't like this - my role in the Twitterverse is not just a bot to pass on the witterings of others, slave like - I like to comment on things, in fact sometimes I don'r RT because I adore the comment., but because I think its BS and want to add my 2p worth of scorn. Or just add my 2p worth.

I see Paul Clarke is similarly grumpy:

Yes, another play on cleaning up your stream – as with #fixreplies. But what’s all this stuff about ‘dictating’ etiquette? What happened to the evolutionary adoption of things that worked? Surely if a long stream of identical tweets was annoying, client applications would evolve that could suppress these at the client. Even I could code that… And if they weren’t identical? Well, that would be because people put in little personal comments along the way with their RTs. So you’d lose those, obviously. (Or have to throw them away depending on how you tuned your duplicate tweet suppression on the client.)

So perhaps this is all a bit of misdirection. Instead of focusing on just how helpful the new RT format is, try working out for yourself what’s really behind new RTs. It shouldn’t take long.

And the fact that hooey like that post from @ev gets bandied about, instead of the honest answer about Twitter’s move into content shaping (and it won’t be the last one), is why I felt strongly about #fixtweetie*, and why this has become a blog post.

So, did you get there? Hear the jingling dollars? And as Dan Moon wisely points out – we can’t overlook that Twitter is a business. Of course they can impose content parameters and design controls if they want. If we don’t like it we can all go back to, erm, Facebook and MSN. Or the Next Big Thing (am working on that…he he).

Certainly another Twitter client - I want my ability to add comments back on Tweetdeck, and I want it now. This one is a biggie for my user experience.

Update - as some helpful people have pointed out in the comments, one can actually adjust Tweetdeck to allow commenting, but it is certainly not the default. So do I feel sorry for my grumpiness above - well, a bit, but not really, because the Tweetdeck upgrade removed a facility I had already and valued, with no warning, and didn't tell me how to recover from it. Now you could argue that I'm being boorish, churlish and damn foolish, but I can tell you this - its the first time since starting to use Tweetdeck that I started to look at other clients. And that, ultimately, is the lesson.

Update to my update - But the ultimate issue is this - Twitter has unilaterally changed a function, that the community evolved, for its own ends, this is where things start to get "interesting" as they say.