Retweets have always been one of Twitter’s most powerful features, except, that ReTweeting was never even a feature that the Twitter team developed.
Retweets using the RT (or the ‘via @user’) format were pioneered and popularized by the early adapters of the service and it is only when twitter attained a mass following did everyone else recognize the potential of retweets.
The official stance on retweeting, however, was still that they’re just a type of tweet and the twitter development team never made any moves to incorporate retweets into their web interface even as almost all third party twitter clients supported retweeting in one form or the other.
Last month the twitter team’s stance changed, though, and they launched a new ReTweet feature that is now a part of the web interface and is now officially the way ReTweets are supposed to work.
Ever since the retweet feature launched, a lot of people have been complaining about the way it has been implemented, specifically the fact that the ReTweeted tweet displays the original tweeter’s DP rather than your friend who RT’ed it.
If you’re one of those who’re annoyed by this implementation, Leonard Lin from userscripts, has a solution for you.
ReTweet Avatars is a Greasemonkey script that changes the way ReTweets are displayed in your timeline and makes it easier to understand the user who retweeted the tweet while still being able to figure out the original author of the tweet.
You need Greasemonkey installed and if you already have that, Just click on the ‘Install’ button to install the Userscript. That shouldn’t take more than a minute.
That’s it. The next time that you visit twitter.com and see an RT’ed tweet, you’ll see your retweeting friend’s avatar and a smaller inset avatar of the original author.
So, in this case Scobleizer is the person I follow and whose Avatar I get to see in my time-line, but I can also see that RWW is the person who originally tweeted out the tweet that Schobleizer RT’ed.
So, do you like this new format better ?
If you’d rather have the original author’s Avatar as the more prominent one and the ReTweeter’s Avatar as the smaller inset, you can make a small change to the script that you just installed.
Just right click the Greasemonkey icon in Firefox’s status bar and select the Manage User Scripts option.
Now, select the Twitter Avatar script and click the Edit button.
This should open up an editor window. Search for the text “inset_retweeter” and change it’s value to 1 from 0.
Save the script and quit the editor.
Now, when you visit Twitter.com, all RTs will show the original author’s Avatar with the ReTweeters Avatar inset.
Do you like the way the new ReTweet functionality has been implemented ? Would this extension solve your problem ? Let me know in the comments.
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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