Twitter integrating the ReTweet
Twitter announced “Project Retweet” today, as the company is now officially working towards integrating a Retweet function directly into the Twitter service, website and API. Twitter plans to launch the feature in “a few weeks” and is currently working with developers to allow them to prepare for the new API features. This means that when the new feature actually does launch, your favorite 3rd party Twitter client such as Tweetdeck, Twidroid, etc, could already have the feature available.
Kudos to Twitter for integrating a feature that is highly desired and will be highly utilized by the community.
Twitter published the following image with their announcement, to give you an idea of what the integrated Retweet feature will look like.
In the image above, notice that the 2nd mock tweet from the top, by ev, is actually a retweet. Underneath, you’ll find the attribution, stating that it was retweeted by biz. So even if you’re not following ev, if you are following biz, you would get a tweet appearing in your stream that looks like it came from ev.
How will this affect the Twitter experience?
This might cause some mild confusion with the Twitter community on the initial rollout, but over the long run, it looks like it will be a great way to handle retweets. You’ll no longer have to crop/edit/squeeze the original tweet that you are retweeting, as the integrated retweet will take up the exact same amount of characters as the original tweet. No more losing precious tweet characters for “RT” or @username, the integrated retweet will be an identical replica of the original tweet, except with an added retweet attribution underneath, but not part of the actual tweet. Pretty freakin cool!
One question remains on how the original tweeter will actually see these new integrated retweets in their own stream. It would be a bit strange if you get a duplicate (re)tweet in your stream that looks like it came from yourself, but how else would you know when/if someone retweeted you?
What do you think about the upcoming integrated retweet?