Twitter has just activated the retweet button a a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August. Below, you’ll find a picture of what it was slated to look like when it was previewed back in September. (We haven’t actually seen this latest implementation yet, but feel free to send us screen shots if you are one of the lucky ones who has the retweet button activated.)
As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically.
We’ve already previewed how the new retweets will look in one third-party app, the as-yet-unreleased Tweetie 2.1. This implementation looks pretty nice, and is not as cluttered as the one previewed by Twitter itself.
Previously, it was also stated that the retweet function will only gather up to 100 retweets, which is limiting.
Here’s the text from Twitter’s post today:
“We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.
You may remember that we shared the mechanics of this feature with developers a while back so they could think about how to work it into Twitter apps. Now we’re ready to start trying it on Twitter. The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we’ll know right away. If things look good, we’ll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.”
That’s nice! A little bit of pics won’t hurt Twitter’s text-based interface.
Definitely! The screenshot looks pretty nice.
I am excited to see how twitter will do this. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Looks very interesting. Will be waiting for twitter to make it available for everyone asap.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Sushant
I am damn sure @scobleizer has it already activated. Afterall @ev paid for his whiskey.
Doesn’t seem like he does, altough @ev obviously has it activated: http://twitter..../5456301291.xml
Check the new tag: “”
Deja vu FriendFeed?
Sounds good. But, isn’t it about time? The retweet function is fundamental – we’ve had to either use a third-party app or “RT” a copy/paste.
Fail-whales are less frequent but IMO they still have infrastructure scaling issues
Hey guys, I got the ReTweet service! Check it out: http://twitpic.com/ofz7r
We’re working on this for TalkingPuffin: http://www.flic...tti/4079742978/
Looks like Twitter will soon end the need to have tweetdeck, seismic desktop and similar apps..
What will happen to tweetmeme that is used to retweet now, including on this site?
The only reason I use iTweet instead of the Twitter web interface is because of the retweet option apart from the instant short url feature (before you tweet). For those who don’t share urls much, this feature upgrade i guess will coax them back to Twitter web.
See retweets in any timeline: http://bit.ly/3MSs4Q
Although I’m not really a supporter of the retweeting culture/echo chamber I do actually prefer this look but I’m sure this will lead to many unhappy bunnies in the development community…
I dont like it.. its starting to look like the mess of a news feed which is facebook
Looking at the screenshot above makes me think of Facebook and their UI which started off nice and simple and then became cluttered.
I just hope Twitter find a way to add these new features without bloating their UI into a big mess they can’t undo.
Arf, that’s too bad, that was supposed to be my best feature on http://tweetcetera.com
I find this update worth considering, but seems like my twitter profile is not as lucky as other
lucky people who see this new update
Hi Everyone! I was lucky enough to get this new feature. It basically looks like the inconvenience of copying and pasting a tweet then adding “RT” has been eliminated. I’ve been using Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop and lately TweetGlide. Which all have done this for a long time.
It looks like Twitter is trying to make using the site as opposed to desktop clients more appealing. I suspect they are trying to draw more users to the website and will eventually implement some sort of revenue generator. Perhaps PPC or PPV ads.
Seems like this RT feature, the new Twitter Lists features, and whatever else they roll out will put some of the desktop twitter tools out of business or at least cause a significant deflation in their usage.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I foresee Twitter integrating on site URL shortener soon too. (anyone know if that has been announced yet?)
I wonder if Twitter is going to evolve into something like FaceBook as mentioned earlier in this thread?
While Twitter may be gearing up to one day give FaceBook a run for its money… I think both need to watch out for Google Wave (GWave) which is going to, and quite possibly will, crush them both.
Thanks for the post.
Eric Bonnici