@LoganGreer If you are upgrading from Tweetie 1.0 to 2.1, yes your old version will remain on your phone. But what we're talking about is the upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1 where the retweet feature was released.

Copy and paste doesn't address most of the issues I listed above. FWIW, the developer of Tweetie doesn't think the discussion is silly:

http://twitter.com/tweetie/status/6240742965
http://twitter.com/tweetie/status/6241001152
http://twitter.com/tweetie/status/6241021911

In that last tweet, he talks about working with Twitter to get some of the suggestions in this article implemented.

@LoganGreer Given RT is a social convention with no central body that defines its use, there is no way it can be technically deprecated. We can simply continue to use the social convention.

FWIW, I have in fact read Chris Messina's post that you link to. Chris contradicts your comment about RT not having meaning:

"The concept is simple and already widely used: sometimes you want to give credit to someone (as part of the pay-it-forward link economy) for something they said or linked to, without quoting them verbatim (which is what RT or “retweeting” is for, in my estimation and use)."

Chris suggests as an alternative specifically because it has different meaning.

But realistically, this isn't a question of whether to use via vs. RT. The issues enumerated in the article like the lack of retweets showing up in lists and the fact that you can't get notification of retweets so that you can participate in the conversation are bigger issues than whether or not we use the word 'via' instead of 'RT.'

If you haven't synced yet and you upgraded on the phone, but not your computer, you can do what @hannahnicklin describes at http://twitter.com/hannahnicklin/status/618250409...

Note, doing so will delete all of Tweetie's data including save searches, settings and passwords. You'll have to reset all of those.

The other alternative is to stick with Tweetie and use the quote feature and edit if needed. Then provide feedback to Twitter (and by extension Tweetie). That's what I ultimately decided after struggling with whether or not I wanted to downgrade my version of Tweetie.

@whiteolorin and I confirmed via email that he is seeing the same thing I am. You can see that something has been retweeted in Tweetie, but not by whom nor how many times.

From some of my email correspondence, I think there may be some confusion about why I talked about the Open Mobile Consortium.

My point wasn't that we need entirely open source phones. I'm a freedom of speech advocate, not necessarily an open source advocate. I don't care that my iPhone has a closed operating system as long as I have the freedom to do what I want on the phone. Some will argue that the open source is the only way to get that, but I feel fine with the balance struck in Mac OS X between open source and proprietary software.

I find Open Mobile Consortium interesting because it is an example of how in other countries we need to mobile solutions simply to ensure that people have freedom of speech, but in the United States we're quick to hand that right that others are fighting for over for the expediency of the App Store and its goodies.

I hope the Open Mobile Consortium is successful, but I doubt I will ever own one of the phones that they produce.

I'm very interested to find out how the Net Neutrality principles that FCC Chairman Genachowski* proposed today may impact mobile web. I think you are right that we perceive desktop Internet as being something that should not be restricted, but tend to think that the carriers own their networks and should be able to do with them as they please.

I am actually less worried about carrier constraints on the mobile web than I am on having the mobile web mature into something that provides the tools we need to build applications and businesses around. But I'm happy to see the FCC taking on the issue.

Thanks for commenting.

* In the interest of full disclosure, Julius Genachowski championed the creation of an iPhone application for the Obama campaign. I have never met him personally, but would likely have not had the opportunity to work on the Obama iPhone app without his advocacy for the project.