Last week Twitter rolled out its new “Lists” feature to try and get its declining users more engaged.
Today the micro-blogging service announced it’s launching its own official Retweet button to a small percentage of accounts.
Retweeting is common practice already. You see it on blogs and news sites across the Web. Basically, a user reads an article and if a retweet button is available, they can click it and have an automatic tweet set up on their Twitter update. Several third party startups like Tweetmeme and Retweet have created these retweet buttons you find across the Web. These buttons are basically a shortcut and eliminate the need to have to create your own Tweet. At the same time, they also track the amount of times the article has been retweeted, sort of giving the article a sense of importance.
The way Twitter plans to integrate the retweet feature is not as an actual button you add to your site, but instead on the Twitter site itself. When a user comes across a tweet they may find interesting, they’ll have an extra option on there to retweet it to their own followers. Eliminating the need to actually copy and paste the tweet onto their own update box. The ‘retweet’ button should appear next the ‘reply’ button according to the sketch from an earlier Twitter blog explaining the new function. It will also show thumbnails of all the users who have retweeted the tweet.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said in the blog post,
“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.
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%.”
Image source of actual SarahSilverman post from TechCrunch
