You've hit the nail on the head with the favoriting feature. That's basically what this is: Favorites - Click a button on a tweet and it goes into a list of tw

You've hit the nail on the head with the favoriting feature. That's basically what this is: Favorites - Click a button on a tweet and it goes into a list of tweets on your account Retweet - Click a button on a tweet and it goes into a list of tweets on your account AND it shows up on your followers' timelines AND you get stats about how many other people retweeted it AND you get notified when your tweets are retweeted AND you can view just the retweets of your friends. Retweets, as Twitter has implemented them, are just favorites upgraded. I think a lot of the controversy would go away if they hadn't co-opted a term from their users and ended up using it in a very different way than it had been defined. An idea to avoid the commenting controversy: Allow an @reply following a retweet to show in your followers' timelines, even if they don't follow that user. Since Twitter won't show you @replies by your friends to users you don't follow yourself, that would be a good way to expose those discussions in a relevant way. UI-wise, there could be a small "comments" box that opens up when retweeting that just posts this @reply as a status update. Best of all, no API changes or backwards compatibility hacks.