Twitter is planning to make retweets an official feature of Twitter.
Retweets are the community’s way of flagging up interesting posts and involve one user copying a tweet and reposting it as their own, with the original user name of the poster and a signal that it’s a retweet.
In a blog posting, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged how important they’ve become to the infrastructure of the service: “Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”
“The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalise retweeting by officially adding it to our platform,” says Stone.
Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be
The project is currently in stage one, with the company publishing the API information to the community for feedback. It appears a fairly simple process with retweeted posts being flagged up beneath the tweet. Users then hover over the tweet and click retweet to flag it up to their followers. See the gallery for official shots on how it will work.
Stage two will see Twitter roll out the service in a limited beta to ensure that Twitter’s performance isn’t adversely affected. The company’s planning to switch the feature on for all users in “a few weeks.”
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