The feature is now available to a bigger number of users and everyone should see it soon

Nov 11, 2009 12:18 GMT  ·  By
Twitter's Retweet feature is now available to a bigger number of users and everyone should see it soon
   Twitter's Retweet feature is now available to a bigger number of users and everyone should see it soon

Twitter has been on a roll lately with a big new feature, Lists, and several partnerships with companies like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. But it's not stopping now, the microblogging service has just launched the long-awaited retweet feature to a bigger number of users and should see a complete roll out soon. As expected, opinions are mixed about the new feature, which changes quite a bit the way retweets work, but the general feel is positive.

So how exactly is it different? Until now, retweets have been used as convention rather than an actual feature from Twitter. If users wanted to share an interesting tweet with their followers, they would copy the original text, add the name of the author, and append 'RT' at the beginning to signal that it's a retweet. The practice became increasingly popular to the point that Twitter decided to implement it as a feature.

However, the company also decided to do some changes, it believes for the best, to the way it worked. Users will now see a retweet link under every tweet, allowing them to share it with just one click. But this way the tweet shows up in the user's stream as coming from the original author, yet signaling that it's a retweet with a small icon in front of it. On the author's stream, a list of people who retweeted the entry also shows up. And if one of the people you're following has the habit of over-retweeting, you might as well turn off the feature just for him.

Of course, there are those who dislike the new system, mostly because it's new, but Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has a very, very lengthy post explaining the drawbacks of the current system and what Twitter has done to overcome them. “I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that's gone into it. I've been a big proponent of this particular design internally at Twitter, because, while it won't serve every use case, I think it offers something new and powerful,” Williams writes.