Techcrunch reported that a retweet feature is in the works which should meet your needs without adding bloat. The other features you desire don’t ring true for me but I am not that heavy of a Twitter user.

I think Twitter are probably very wary of a move away from the “open ended” approach to more “functional” one. What do I mean by this?

Well “open ended” is, as now, where you’ve got few buttons/facilities etc and you’ve got to accomplish everything you need within the tweet itself. A benefit here is a simple, uncluttered interface (and a lower hurdle for third party clients to implement) but a downside is that users have to get the format of the tweet right otherwise problems occurs. If you want to put “meta data” in a tweet then you need hashtags – e.g “ran #5K today in #45mins (#excercise-plotter)” – get the tweet format right then a third party app can do all manner of things with the data.

“Functional” is more like Facebook where they don’t expect the tweet to have any meta data in it as they would explicitly gather such data using buttons etc. Eg look at how FB capture information on your latest run etc? Buttons/duration etc – very functional – which leads to good quality data but the interface is more complex and there is a bigger learning curve.

Given that FB are trying to fight the bloat with “Facebook Lite” I would assume that Twitter are very wary about putting on weight – they know they have to – they just want to put it on in the right places!

Sorry for the long comment – I got carried on my away on my Blackberry whilst my daughter watched early morning tv.