Twitter Contributors May Be Getting a Wider Roll-Out

Twitter is moving slowly but surely when it comes to its business features and accounts we've been hearing so much about. Slated for introduction at the end of 2009, not much has materialized even until now. It looks like it may be moving closer to launching at least one feature aimed at businesses, Twitter Contributors, announced last December.

The feature has been enabled on Saleforce's Twitter account, as TechCrunch notes. Until now, the feature has been available for the @twitter account and possibly other accounts for testing. Twitter Contributors enables multiple people to use the same account, but still get credited as the authors. The tweets show up in the main Twitter stream of the account, but will get different 'by lines' depending on who actually wrote the tweet.

It is easy to see why this feature would be a big boom for businesses. It allows companies to have a central account to handle their Twitter presence, but also have individual people associated with the company contribute to it in a transparent way. Allowing people to share an account isn't really possible on Twitter at the moment. Businesses either have to share the account credentials with everyone using it or employ a professional tool like CoTweet.

Twitter announced the feature late last year and hasn't made any other comments since then. It is slated to be a part of the Twitter premium features, which the microblogging service has been talking about for quite a while now. Though Twitter Contributors seems to be getting some more testers, it's unclear if this means that a wider roll-out is imminent or it's just another phase of testing.

"Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we'll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners," Twitter said when the feature was first introduced, three months ago.