Twitter Retreats on the Retweets

Barely out the door, the latest feature Twitter decided to bless its users with, retweets, has now been disabled by the microblogging site after several issues creeped up during the wider roll-out. The feature has been M.I.A. for more than half a day and it doesn't look like it's back up at this point. The funny thing is that some may be glad that it's gone as the new retweet feature has gotten its fair share of criticism.

“We’re working on a few problems related to the ongoing rollout. These should be resolved quickly and it will be back on for those who had the Retweet feature previously. And we’ll then continue the incremental rollout of this feature to everyone,” the announcement on the Twitter status blog reads.

There aren't any details to the nature of the problems or when they are expected to be fixed. Twitter was in the process of rolling out the feature to a wider set of people after it has been in a limited testing period for several weeks. It looked like Twitter was ready for a complete roll out, which would have been finished by this time if everything went according to plan. But, as with any new feature, problems are bound to pop up and Twitter should be fixing them soon.

The retweet feature was implemented to integrate the practice which people have been using for months now into to the proper site. This way some of the problems, associated with the way retweets used to work, would be solved by the official implementation. The problem is that Twitter also decided to make some rather big changes, at least in the view of certain more vocal Twitterers, which alter the way it works.

Twitter has defended the changes, with cofounder and CEO Evan Williams listing some of the biggest problems with the old system and how Twitter's implementation solves them. Some people aren't convinced though and have some valid points as to why the old way was better. But, of course, most of them didn't even have time to test the new feature anyway and will have to wait until Twitter fixes it to get a chance.