Twitter Offers a Peek at the Upcoming Retweet Feature

Twitter has made another big step towards releasing its upcoming retweet API, by giving users a glimpse at how it will look like plus a more detailed explanation on how it will work. The actual launch is now “close at hand” and some people have already seen the new functionality in action coming from the few that are already testing the feature.

Straight off, there is a rather big change for developers, as Twitter has decided to give up on the idea of collapsible retweets, which were supposed to be used when a tweet would get retweeted multiple times. “Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated and confusing. We're not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it,” Marcel Molina, a Twitter platform developer, wrote in a Google Groups message detailing the new feature.

Previously, Twitter asked developers to do “internal book keeping” to check whether a retweet had already come in multiple times but that will now be done on Twitter's end with every new retweet coming in after the first retweet. This new way of handling the retweets should make it easier for developers and Twitter apologized to the developers who might have already been working on the collapsing functionality.

One interesting fact also revealed is that the retweet feature will only display the first 100 retweets, after which it cuts off. It makes sense, as having more than 1,000 usernames and avatars listed after a popular tweet would prove overwhelming. Finally, Twitter also released a mock-up of how the feature would look like, though it noted that this wasn't the only possibility and it might change before launching.