Twitter: the service that you either love or loathe. If you loathe it, please just move on, there’s nothing to see here. However, if you are a tweeter, this might interest you.

The above image shows how the difference between two different types of retweets, as visualized in Tweetdeck). You can see the two versions – the top is the “new and improved” version, whereas the bottom tweet is the user-defined version (RT means retweet for the uninitiated). Naturally, they’re both attempting to explain the same thing, that someone found a tweet from their stream interesting and want to share this 140 character morsel of genius with those who are following them.

The problem lies in how this tweet is visualized. Perhaps it’s the terrible UI that Tweetdeck employs (which is a completely different blog entry). But I’ve decided that TweetDeck is the best Twitter application for me, even though Adobe Air is for jerks.

In the new version, you see the originator of the tweet as the large icon, as well as their username (in this case, it’s @nodepression). The person who I follow who decided to retweet this has their icon, but it’s displayed very small. If I happen to recall which Twitter user this icon belongs to, that’s pretty awesome. But I don’t always, because I’m more of a name recognition person. Additionally, there’s no easy way to reply to the person I’m following who retweeted it in Tweetdeck, and I like to start conversations with those people sometimes if I find their RT to be intriguing.

But even more importantly than that, I want to instantly know which of the people I follow is retweeting this.

Why is this important? The reason is that I weigh the retweets of people I follow differently. Each retweet in the new system shows a username and icon who I’m probably not following, so I have to first figure out what the hell this tweet is doing in my stream, and then I need to figure out who the hell was retweeting it. By the old “RT @[Twitter user]: message” system, I could instantly identify who was retweeting this. If I generally like their retweets, I’ll read it. But I don’t read everyone’s tweets. And this new system makes it much more difficult to determine who is retweeting this into my stream.

I feel that Twitter’s web-based visualization is better (above), but still not what I’m looking for. I’m more interested in who is retweeting what, rather than who wrote it in the first place. If i like the tweet, I’ll search to see who wrote it, at which time I can determine whether to follow this person or not. Incidentally, I also think that Twitter is pretty unusable through their website, unless you follow less than 100 folks or so. So whether it looks good or bad at twitter.com is meaningless to me.

I’ve heard through Matt Galligan that Tweetie is pretty good, but I haven’t used it on my Mac since the first time it was released. Wasn’t too impressed with it, even though their iPhone app is the best Twitter client out there (on any platform).

What Twitter needs to realize is that their users will dictate how their service is being used. And they should be focusing on bringing new features to Twitter (and working to keep their uptime up near 100% – which has gotten better, but they still drop the ball more than a legit company should, I think).

A good place to start would be to better organize threaded conversations, sometimes it’s a real bitch to figure out where they start, or even who is even involved.