Good thinking here, Andrew. BTW many thanks for promoting my post on the same topic.

As for the bit about “pandering for social capital”, I would say that from a Behavioral Economics perspective, that can never be fully divorced out of the equation. Nor should it be:

As I tried to make clear in my post, social capital (i.e. trust, asf.) as an ongoing unconscious calculus is very real. A little bit of it is put on the line with each tweet, and each retweet. So why would we want to take ourselves almost completely out of the equation, and lose our voice?

That’s what Social Media has been about at the core after all, everyone having a voice. Sure, there are many "Powerbrokers" that wish this hadn’t happened, and would like nothing better than to take it back (Murdoch/Old Media, etc. etc.).

So it seems that at a deeper level, Twitter is learning (for the second time, first came the @ replies brouhaha) a lesson about a “Powerbroker vs. Friend” archetype conflict: Trying to tell us how to do something (The Powerbroker) that was established at a community (The Friend) level.

Which is why I really wondered if they of all people still don’t get social media. Or that they have built the platform(s) (same goes for Facebook) to allow the community to yell more loudly than ever before about having Twitter trying to dictate something.

By all means click through to read Andrew's detailed post about the "New Twitter Retweet".

I wrote a post on the same issue from a slightly different angle yesterday that got a lot of interest:

Twitter Tries To Change Retweets, Doesn’t Get The Social In Social Media

Read it if you haven't yet, it seems to have struck a nerve.