Most of you have seen, or at least heard about, the new Retweet functionality in Twitter as they continue to roll out beta testing. And at first glance you may not understand why this change was needed.  Didn't Retweet work just fine?

Well, there were some shortcomings on the legacy Retweet functionality. Among other things, Retweet lacked the ability to maintain attribution, was messy with repeating "RT", and poured redundant tweets into your Twitter feed if more than one follower Retweeted the same message.

The new Retweet functionality seeks to address all of these deficiencies. The design adds a retweet link next to the tweet that will allow you to Retweet that message to all of your followers. Meta information (original tweeter / retweeter) about the tweet is removed from the text and included in the line below the tweet. And they are no longer redundant because this design change allows Twitter to track and only show you the first Retweet of a message.

And don't worry about support through your 3rd party apps. Twitter has confirmed that most of the app developers have already started to incorporate this feature and will make it available in future releases.

While the new Retweet is still in beta, the potential for a much improved experience is there.  And cleaner data presentation is better for everyone.

An in-depth review into the methodology behind the new Retweet can be read on Evan Williams blog. Evan is a co-founder and CEO of Twitter.

Five years ago today Firefox 1.0 was released, and so began a revolution of the web browser as we know it.  Many thanks to the Mozilla team for their efforts in advancing the web experience for everyone.

www.spreadfirefox.com/5years