Twitter co-founder Ev Williams tries to do some pre-emptive damage control in a blog post early last night explaining a new Retweeting feature that 1) provides a RT button, and 2) prevents RTers from editing a tweet or adding their own 2 cents as part of the RT.

You know Ev expects trouble when he posts a long blog about changes, and it’s trouble he’s a-gettin’. First, though, here’s some of what he says in defense of the move:

I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. …

While retweets as they work today are great, they have some drawbacks. Notably:

The attribution is confusing in the best case. But it’s worse because different clients treat RTs differently, and if someone retweets a retweet it gets messy fast. People shorten and edit retweeted tweets to make them fit along with the extra metadata. Even when for legit purposes, that can be misleading and unfair to the author. …

If five people you follow retweet the same thing, you get five copies, which can be useful but it a lot of noise. …

Let’s face it: Some people over-retweet. You may be interested in what they personally say, but you don’t need to know about every link and charity cause they pull their RT-happy trigger finger on.

Ev’s bottom line: RTing as currently practiced can be chaotic and a hassle (true), and it makes it difficult to fulfill “Twitter’s goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible” (debatable). Then he explains the change:

There’s a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet (more on that below). The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they’re built natively into the system, they’re trackable. And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.

It will be very quick and easy to retweet, you’ll never have to edit the text, and you also won’t have to worry if your followers have already seen something, so this should encourage retweeting more and more useful stuff flowing farther.

Of course, some Twitter peeps want to edit the text, for two main reasons: 1) if taking up extra space with their own Twitter name and the “RT” indicator on the retweet would put it over the 140-character limit, and 2) to include their own value-add (snark, insight, etc.).

But what some of the complainers may be overlooking is that they still can RT the old way. I just did, using WebNewser followers as guinea pigs (sorry, it’s in the interest of science). Here’s my “old school” RT (I deleted @buzzblog’s hashtags and added a comment), and here’s one I did using the new RT feature. You can see below what each looks like (old-school first):

As Lance Ulanoff notes in his tweet that I RTed, Williams hardly rules out eventually allowing RT editing. He says so near the bottom of last night’s blog post:

We left (the ability to annotate or comment) out of this first version mostly for simplicity. It’s especially tricky when you consider transports like SMS where adding a lot of structure or additional content is hard. But we have some ideas there, and it’s possible we’ll build that in at a later date. (This point should not be missed.)

So the Twitterverse should survive this seismic change.