Twitter to make retweeting official

published 14 August 2009

Twitter has confirmed its plans to make retweets an official feature within its social networking platform.

Retweeting is when users' re-post another author's tweets as their own with a mention to the original author.

Retweets represent an example of "people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate", said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post.

"Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be," said Stone.

Users' are currently retweeting on the site, but this unofficial method is quite cumbersome and not many users know about it, said Stone.

He added: "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."

According to the post, phase one of the retweet project is to show the developer community how the official platform will work from both an API and user perspective.

The official platform will be tested in beta mode prior to its full launch, according to Stone, to make sure everything works from a systems perspective.

"In a few weeks or so we'll launch the feature on our web site and because app developers had a chance to prepare, it should become available across most of the Twitter ecosystem about the same time," said Stone.

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