Twitter has just announced the public limited roll out of its new retweet functionality.
In a blog post the company says:
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.
So what is Project Retweet exactly?
Now, the Twitter website doesn’t currently support a Retweet (RT) option. As of now, you have to copy the person’s tweet, append an RT @”person who tweeted”. The trouble with that is that often, the 140 character tweet has to be shortened. Plus, if there’s a RT chain… you are Retweeting a Retweet, adding all the intermediaries is a major headache.
The Retweet is so popular, that though the Twitter site does not support it, most other third-party clients do. Be it the popular TwitterFox or Tweetdeck, or any other client on mobile, browser or desktop. Even in a recent study, less than 50% actually use the website.
So now, with Project Retweet, Twitter is allowing for RT support on the website. itself. The following picture indicates the idea.
And what it should look like once a tweet has been retweeted a number of times, courtesy of Mashable
Cool beans.
very nice good article thanks
I’ve got some screenshots if you’re interested: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/twitters-new-retweet/
thanks Malcolm – will put a post up about it now. much appreciated
Twitter, it’s About Time to add the RT feature!
Great Feature. Great Idea. I’m sure it will make RTs easier, but It will definitely be used by evil spammers.
I find this update worth considering, but seems like my twitter profile is not as lucky as other
lucky people who see this new update
And what a nice way to increase stickiness to the site.
“Must sign off now. Oh – wait – 20 more tweets. OK, must sign off now. Oh – wait – 5 more tweets. Must sign off now…”
Looking forward to getting this. I think :-o
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
F5 is gonna be soooo happy!
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
Yeah that is exactly how it works. I was about to close the window when I noticed 11 more tweets. This will have a huge impact…
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
Interesting post, thanks.
I saw the screenshot of ‘new tweets’ indicator for the first time.
Would you show us the screenshot of RT button?
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
They are all here: http://thenextweb.com/appetite…..eet-works/
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
ilke this vastrale.ru
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
It looks like Twitter is really starting to mature with all the changes the are rolling out.
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
I figured this is why Twitter created the list function so you can really keep up with those people who you really enjoy reading. When you hit to refresh you miss a whole lot of tweets.
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com
A few additional thoughts –
I assume that many people use third-party applications like TweetDeck, HootSuite or twhirl, in which case your initial reaction to this new feature might be, “big deal” since these applications already have built-in retweet functionality.
However, if you’re like me and like to have Twitter.com open in the background and occasionally tweet from there, you will notice that while the new feature is very easy to use, you’re unable to add additional context, which can often times be important or helpful when retweeting. It would be great to have a preview window that allowed you to add more context before sending the tweet instead of the confirmation window that says, “Retweet to your followers?” – What do you guys think?
This comment was originally posted on Lava Row, Social media consulting, strategy and web marketing
Interesting how Twitter Lists was a big hit, but a lot of the chatter around Project Retweet has been mixed. Some quotes that popped out at me immediately:
“They shouldn’t have called it RT. It’s a copy of FriendFeed’s likes.” – @Scobleizer on Twitter.
“Disappointed by the Twitter RT implementation, not surprisingly. It doesn’t actually support the way people RT.” – danah boyd (@zephoria) on Twitter.
I agree that the RT feature needs to evolve as Hillary described below. We’d love to hear what the rest of you think!
This comment was originally posted on Lava Row, Social media consulting, strategy and web marketing
This hasn’t rolled out to my account yet (heck, I only got Lists last weekend, so I must be on their bottom tier somehow), but I agree with Hillary – the retweeting functionality in Tweetdeck etc. is much better because it allows you to add context. While this new feature takes out some of those pesky extra characters of RT @soandso, losing the ability to comment is too much to make it terribly useful.
This comment was originally posted on Lava Row, Social media consulting, strategy and web marketing
the whole point to a RT for me is to add my own commentary…how else can you stake some claim to a RT!
This comment was originally posted on Lava Row, Social media consulting, strategy and web marketing
I use the RT feature in tweetie as a way to display short conversations to all my follwers. When someone mentions my handle I will often RT them with my own commentary allowing my other followers to read the entire conversation in one tweet and not have to click around. I would be very disappointed if Twitter chose to remove this ability all together. I think project retweet is a great idea for some uses, however, not everybody RT’s the same way. I hope the third party applications allow me to still RT with my own commentary, if not for me, then for my followers who want both sides of a conversation in one tweet!
Thanks for this insight, Nathan and Hillary!
This comment was originally posted on Lava Row, Social media consulting, strategy and web marketing