For whatever reason, it’s clear that Twitter want you to use ‘new’ style retweets. They are better for analytics and data-mining, and lower the barriers to participation for unseasoned users.

However, if you’re like me and prefer old school retweets you may be annoyed that the so-called #NewTwitter makes this rather hard. If you want to quote someone’s tweet and add your own anecdote, you’ll have to copy and paste the tweet and then type out the “RT @username” part. It annoyed me enough to make a JavaScript bookmarklet to solve the problem.

Full blog post on that topic to follow, in the mean time, here’s the bookmarklet –

» Old School RTs <- drag to your bookmarks; go to twitter.com; click to enable

Important Note:
Always ensure you trust the person supplying a bookmarklet containing JavaScript code!
If you don’t trust me, don’t add it.

Full-ish instructions

Firefox and Safari – simply drag the bookmark link to your toolbar.

Internet Explorer – right click the link and “add favourite” to the “favourites bar” – a bit of a rigmarole.

Once on twitter.com, click the bookmark button in your toolbar to enable the old school “RT” button. It appears next to the reply and retweet buttons, and is visible on rollover. You don’t need to click it again until you leave, and return to twitter.com

Chrome users – I’m not sure how to use a bookmarklet in Chrome, but if you search for Chrome extensions called “retweet” you’ll find that other people have written an extension that does the same as this.