Twitter to Officially Support Retweets

This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending how you look at it, but some of Twitter's most used and loved features, even the most basic ones, came from the community not the development team, and it usually takes a while before official support comes in. Retweets have been used on a large scale for months but only now is the platform preparing to introduce support for the feature though this could mean some changes in the way it currently works.

“Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That's why we're planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com,“ cofounder Biz Stone wrote on the official Twitter blog.

Currently, retweeting involves manually copying and pasting the original tweet and adding an @reply mentioning the author and the fact that it is a retweet. It works but it’s far from ideal so Twitter wants to integrate the functionality, just like it did with @replies, which also started out as a convention among users before becoming a part of the platform.

The feature is still pretty much in the planning/development phase but Stone has sketched, literally, the way it's going to work. One big change is the fact that there will be no mention of it being a retweet in the message itself; instead there will be a smaller line below the message indicating this. However, even more interesting is the fact that the tweet will retain its original author and will show up unchanged in the stream of the user that retweeted it even if his followers don't follow the original author as well.

Twitter isn't ready to launch the new feature just yet and “phase one” will apparently be the release of retweet API to get support ready from third-party developers in time for a larger release. The new retweeting system will also launch in the next few weeks for a limited set of users to test and tweak the functionality before the full-scale deployment.