Twitter begins to make 'retweeting' a formal part of site

by Jennifer Whitehead, Brand Republic 06-Nov-09, 11:25

LONDON - The Twitter community's practice of retweeting fellow users' messages is to be formally incorporated in to the site's design, along with the ability for users to track how many times a tweet is repeated by others.

Twitter says that the feature is only available on a very small percentage of accounts for now.

The feature will add a "retweet" button to the bottom of each tweet, next to where the reply button currently sits. While this feature is available in Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, it is the first time it will be on the main Twitter site. Retweets can also be undone from the same place.

Of interest to those who use Twitter to spread information, marketing offers and the like, is a feature that shows how many times and by whom a message has been retweeted using the Twitter button.

Company founder Biz Stone writes: "The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we'll know right away.

"If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%."

Twitter recently rolled out the "lists" function, allowing users to add other tweeters to personalised lists and follow what they are saying with one click.