Today, @blondediva asked why people don’t use native retweets.  This might not be obvious to a non-programmer, who hasn’t used the Twitter API.  To those of use who use the API, it is crystal-clear: people don’t use native retweets because many clients don’t show them.  Many clients don’t show them because the native retweets are in their own, separate timeline.

Each Twitter user actually has several timelines, including a “friends timeline” that shows most incoming tweets, a “mentions timeline” that shows mentions, etc.  All of these timelines have to be downloaded separately and dealt with.  In the case of Twit Menulet, we merge them all together into a River-of-News type format.

To me, adding another http connection/download/integration into the river event doesn’t make much sense.  It is a pain, and I personally hate the native retweets.  But, users want this feature, so we are working on it.  It will be there in the next version.  I promise.