The Twitter team do seem to do a fairly good job of realising that the tool is defined by the people who use it, not by the people who write it in the first place (hmm reminds me of Activity Theory, if I have plucked the right theory from my tired mind!) - will be interesting to see how they do with implementing the ReTweet functionality they describe.

On the other side of the coin, I am starting to see some benefit (though not much) to the change they imposed regarding @replies. I am still not happy with it, and think they could have done it differently, but it isn’t entirely bad.  Essentially, I think they would have done better to use a different character to indicate the semi-private nature they have introduced with a leading @Blah - if you used @Blah for general messages which everyone can see but which refer to an individual and, say >Blah to direct it just to them, but letting your mutual friends see it, it would be good (I think).

In fact, it makes me think of a number of other possibilities - you could have Fred>George to recommend Fred to follow George, for instance.