The links for retweets still work even though they seem hidden

Alas, with NEW NEW TWITTER now rolled out for most people (everyone?) these links no longer work and resolve to the Twitter / Interactions page. Favstar still works perfectly though, I recommend using that. I've done a strikethrough on the text below, keeping it there for historic reasons though.

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I am now convinced that 2011 is the year that social media went a bit crap. I've been muttering about Google and Twitter (and especially Google AND Twitter when they stopped the fantastically useful Google Realtime) for a few months now and I think an earlier tweet by @Evil_Dumbledore expressing the opinion that Twitter's new look is like people who have facial surgery in the hopes of looking better but end up looking worse is about right. 

Don't get me started on the changes to their terms and conditions which made the easy exporting of tweets a distant memory.

Anyway - I didn't properly shut down my computer last night so I still had the option to capture the links for the three items in the Retweets column. I've checked each and they appear to work (no guarantee that they'll work in future though) so here they are if you want to access just the RTs themselves, without all the @mention nonsense.

Retweets by others: https://twitter.com/#!/retweets_by_others

Retweets by you: https://twitter.com/#!/retweets

Your tweets, retweeted: https://twitter.com/#!/retweeted_of_mine

Twitter's done this before (hidden the pointers that used to go to links), most notably with RSS - there used to be a small RSS icon at the bottom of most pages but that disappeared earlier this year. I trapped the URLs for those too before being migrated permanently to 'New Twitter' and you can find them by searching for RSS here - again no guarantee that RSS feeds will be available from Twitter in future. Bastards ;)

Edit: 11 November 2011

@carolinepennock spotted that if you remove the #! from the tweet then you can call up a page where you'll see the old tabs. I've represented this visually below :-)

Retweets by Others | Retweets by you | Your tweets, Retweeted - the middle one doesn't work, it just resolves to the new #! version.

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I also highly recommend Favstar as a tool for seeing all sorts of information about your tweets and those of others in terms of what's been retweeted and favourited. As always you get a bit more if you authorise it and log in via Twitter.

Tweets of mine that were recently retweeted (just replace my name with yours to see yours):

http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/recent

• Most retweeted: http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/most_retweeted
• Most favorited*: http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/most_favorited

*sounds a bit biblical doesn't it...

While I'm having a moan Twitter appears to have killed off Blackbird Pie which let you plug in a tweet URL, eg https://twitter.com/#!/TeamJanetUK/status/134703908445622272 (a fellow warrior in the fight to get RTs reinstated as their own button) and get a bit of code to embed in your blog - enabling you to embed tweets on an ad hoc basis. It's still perfectly possible to embed tweets but it's just that bit faffier. Stop it.