I don’t watch The Hills, and I have no idea who Stephanie Pratt is. Earlier today, I (somehow) stumbled across a conversation between Stephanie and another Twitter user. Stephanie was being pressed as to why she only seemed to reply to ‘other famous people’, and she volunteered this response.

Outstanding prose aside, this is actually a somewhat enlightening statement. I’ve speculated before about how the ‘real world’ interaction that celebrities on Twitter are now facing with the public is something that many of them would not in any way have been prepared for, and the departure of such luminaries as Miley Cyrus and Lily Allen over the past few weeks underlines this.

And while on one hand you can absolutely understand Stephanie’s reluctance to delve into the murky waters of her replies and mentions folder – there are a lot of strange characters out there, after all – to deliberately avoid these communications (unless one is feeling really, really brave) essentially puts a thick black line through the words social media and replaces them with soapbox.

It’s a two-way mechanism, folks, and not one that’s just limited to the proles. Either embrace social media and learn to deal with the weirdos and stalkers (and master the block) or hand control over to your PR team. The latter is a complete fail too, of course (I’m looking at you Amy Winehouse and Tom Cruise), but it’s a heck of a lot better than intentionally ignoring us.

If you take a close look at your timeline on Twitter.com today you’ll notice that there’s been a slight cosmetic change to each tweet that likely means that Twitter’s internal retweet functionality is soon to appear on the network.

See the space being made available to the left of ‘Reply’? That’s probably where the retweet button is going to appear, or perhaps reply will shift left, with retweet on the right.

Why is it controversial? Because it’s very different to the retweet that you and I have come to love. The implementation, codenamed Project Retweet by Biz Stone in his blog post about the new feature last August, completely changes the way that retweets are handled. Rather than simply re-coding Twitter to analyse the RTs, vias and so on that most people understand and use, Twitter determined it made more sense to present the retweet whole – that is, when you retweet somebody (using the internal button), their entire tweet will appear in the stream of the people who follow you (as well as their username, avatar etc), and you’ll be credited below.

Here’s a sketch Biz put together to illustrate the idea:

While I can see some of the logic, I personally think this is going to be very confusing for many people who use Twitter. Lots of folk are going to see people they don’t follow and avatars they don’t recognise appearing in their timelines, and not like it. If you’re following a few hundred people now and a number of them are big retweeters, suddenly it might seem like you’re following twice that amount.

Perhaps more importantly, because these Twitter-powered retweets are not in any way editable you will not be able to style them to your liking. As said, they come 100 per cent as is. This means you cannot add your own comments, something that lots of folk love to do (myself included). Which means that many people will likely continue to use the manual retweet system as before, just to have a little flexibility. I, for example, almost exclusively use via, because I like the content to come first. (There’s been some talk from Twitter that future versions of this system may allow the user to configure the retweet in some way, but that won’t be an option on launch.)

There is some good news. In-built retweets will come with metadata, which should give us lots of lovely numbers to play with (most retweeted users, most retweeted tweets etc). You can turn retweets off on a per-user basis, which at least gives you some control over the impact on your timeline. (I can see this being very popular.) And seeing new faces in your timeline may introduce you to new people to follow – or perhaps avoid.

(I’m not sure what the mechanism will do with retweets of people you have blocked – I assume they won’t show up in your timeline, whereas using the manual RT function we have now they do.)

And while in six months or a year the obvious pros of an internal retweet mechanism will likely mean all these niggles are a thing of the past, when the system goes live it’s going to be very messy, and very confusing. Particularly if it’s staggered into the network like Twitter’s lists feature. Expect #fixretweets or something very similar to be trending shortly after Project Retweet launches.

You’re a huge, global brand, and you’re on Twitter. You have lots of support employees on the network, and sensibly you’ve each allocated them a @name_company or @company_name username (i.e., ASOS_james). You have a unit working under your name, and they’re doing good things.

One of your employees becomes the real star of the team, and gets tens of thousands of followers over many months, offering fantastic support and just enough personality to be a hit. He starts getting a lot of attention.

Then one day, suddenly, he quits.

What now?

Some things to consider:

1. Do you allow him to announce in his (current) Twitter account that he’s moving to another company, even if it’s a rival?
2. Do you let another employee take over the account? And do you do this on the sly, or do you make it public knowledge?
3. Do you rename the account, allocating it to another employee? What about those 50,000 followers – how are they going to react knowing their superstar is no longer in charge?
4. Do you let the person running the account rename it, and take it over, doing with it as they will?
5. Or do you just close the account? What about all those cases they solved, and help they gave? There’s a history there.

This is going to be a big deal in the future. I can see lawyers getting involved deciding who really ‘owns’ the tweets on employee accounts – or even the account itself. Yes, you’re tweeting on company time using company resources, but it’s your personality that’s made that account a success. It’s you that nurtured those followers, and it’s you that turned them into clients. When star salespeople leave companies, they often take clients with them. Indeed, their clients want to go. Why should it be any different on Twitter?

If you’re an individual like Jeremiah Owyang that moves his essentially personal account between companies, then it’s less of a problem. Owyang is the account. He takes it with him when he leaves. This perhaps seems like the right way forward, but it’s not necessarily best practice for companies to let employees use their personal accounts for work (and vice versa). And both lose the advantages of being associated with the brand name.

It becomes significantly less clear about what is the right thing to do – in both the contractual and ethical sense – if somebody becomes a superstar on Twitter using their work-only account, and then leaves. By association, the company becomes a superstar, too, particularly if the individual is being applauded for great support, and the ramifications of what happens when he or she quits (or, daresay, is fired) are considerable.

And as such, it might be worth thinking about the inevitability of that future now, as opposed to when it actually happens. Because believe me, it will.

I’m attending the Media140 conference in London today. In fact, by the time you read this, I’ll already be there or perhaps still on the (0639) train. I’m excited, because the subject this time is brands, something which has become very much a part of my working life in the past few months.

This is the second Media140 event. The previous and first, which I also attended in May of this year, was a huge success. This second event is bigger and by all accounts should be better, too – it’s completely sold out.

(The after-party is a blast. Tickets are still available here.)

I’ll be live-tweeting the entire event, which runs from 9am until about 6pm, and you can follow everything by tracking the #media140 hashtag on Twitter. If you follow me on Twitter, that’s pretty much all I’ll be tweeting about in the day.

Also, if you’re looking for a great list of people to follow, all of whom are involved with this year’s event, check out the Media140 list on TweepML.

If you’re attending tomorrow and want to say hello, I’ll be the guy with the shaved head and the black Samsung NC10 netbook. My default expression seems to be the scowl, but I assure you I’m a lot friendlier than I look. Would be nice to hook up, and put some names to faces.

A little bit of fun for the weekend: the most popular search definitions for Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed, according to Google (the top-ranking terms are highlighted in blue).

Feel free to try it yourself.