Twitter is rolling out a new update, to its iPhone and Web apps, that will now enable users add more characters than usual whenever they use the “quote tweet” function.
Originally, when you elect to quote a tweet, Twitter pastes the entire quoted text into text area, leaving you with limited characters to tweet with, depending on how many characters the original tweet had.
Yup “@MuyoSan: WhatsApp call quality is impressive! None of that BBM dirt quality”
— Bufic🤴🏿 (@OVOwn_) April 1, 2015
Now instead of pasting the text, Twitter will display a card of the entire original tweet, giving you more room – as much as 116 characters – to add your commentary on top. I guess this means we can now say goodbye to MTs (modified tweets) and modified RTs.
All you have to do to use this feature on the web is tap the Retweet icon, add your comment and then send away.
“Down to Desmond Elliot” ? https://t.co/ec7jCoD41u
— Múyìwá Mátùlúkò (@MuyoSan) April 7, 2015
If you have no commentary, you can just leave the text area empty, Twitter will redisplay the original Tweet on your timeline the traditional way.
If you are using the iPhone app, you will need to take an extra step by tapping the Quote Tweet button.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/585225218093932544
This “new feature” appears to be nothing more than an improvement on embedded tweets on Twitter, which require you to include the URL of the original tweet into your tweet – pain in the ass if you’re tweeting from mobile. What Twitter has done now with the new quote tweet feature is to abstract the whole process for the user, by taking the scaffolding to the background.
Users of the official iPhone and Desktop Twitter apps should start receiving the quote tweet update any time from now. Android users can expect to get the new quoted tweets feature “soon”.
