14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been on a roll lately launching new features on a rate rarely seen in the past year or so. It just launched a major feature, Lists, which is already proving very popular and is changing the way many are using the service. Now, it's ready to launch a brand-new one, first announced in August, which may be even bigger than Lists, the integrated retweet feature aptly dubbed Project Retweet. Twitter is introducing it for a small number of people at first, to see how it works out.
“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,” Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone wrote.
The feature was detailed a fair bit before, but it's now clearer how Twitter decided to implement it. Retweets are one of the biggest things that have come out of Twitter, but, interestingly, and perhaps fittingly, it was the users themselves that introduced it and made it popular. Employing retweets, popular and interesting tweets would reach a much greater number of people than just the users' followers.
Twitter has made some changes to the way the process works, but they're not that significant so as to have much of a backlash. Now, each tweet will get a small “retweet” link next to the reply one. Entries that have been retweeted will have a retweet icon next to them to differentiate them from the regular tweets. Underneath the tweet, there will be a list of some users who have retweeted it, but only from those one follows. Finally, one will also be able to filter the users they follow to see retweets only from the ones they want.