A lot of people, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have decided to quietly ignore the controversial Retweet feature and stick with the old-school method of retweeting.

The new RT Tool makes no sense. If you talk to users who are serious about social networking, we tend to labor under a shared assumption: if you can shorten or improve a tweet so it will read better and spread more effectively, then you are at liberty to modify the tweet. Bonus points for adding personality and/or snark.

That said, there are at least two things about the Auto-Retweet feature that are not lame:

[1] The new Retweet feature benefits people with long@$$ usernames because the RT Tool lets you go over-budget on the 140 character limit. That is, when a tweeter has used all 140 characters, you no longer have to pick through and remove the vowels or unnecessary words in order to shrink the tweet and make space for the person’s handle. The feature automatically appends their name when you click the RT button; effectively extending the character limit to 160.

[2] Artists can feel happy because the RT Tool keeps #Twitterart fresh and looking the way they intended. Because of the way it wraps the source data, retweeting with the RT Tool does not disrupt the composition. In fact, it’s a good idea to always use the RT Tool for #Twitterart because it preserves the integrity of the artwork.

Fortunately, Twitter has allowed the users to opt out of using the Auto-Retweet button. As it stands now, the thing is pretty useless for day-to-day work, but the people with long names and those creating #Twitterart gain some small advantages.

Learn more about #Twitterart.