I would go further than the original report and say that the icons are pretty useless in themselves: an envelope with an arrow does… what? Email the status to somebody? And a set of gears… huh? Icons ought to be as self-evident as possible, and having to hover over them to see the tooltips to understand their meaning is a failure in the icons’ design IMO.

With most statuses being quite limited in length, there’s plenty of screen real estate available, so why not just use text indicators for each of the icon’s functions, such as ’Reply’ and ’More…’?

(Hope I’m not making this sound too brash, I think Gwibber is an excellent tool and this is a minor annoyance.)