Twitter to change Retweets

14 August 2009 1:11 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Twitter is about to change the way twitter users use the Retweet function, in what is being seen as the biggest change to the micro-blogging service since it went mainstream.

Following feedback and watching now users interact with the service, Twitter founder and chief blogger, Biz Stone outlined the possible change on the company's blog on Thursday.

"Some of Twitter's best features are emergent - people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own, reference the original author with an @mention, and finally, indicate that it's a retweet. The process works although it's a bit cumbersome and not everyone knows about it".

The solution it seems is to allow users to see retweets from people they follow, even if they don't follow the person the being retweeted.

The result should be that users will be opened to a wider audience of people, although those worried about getting information overload will be able to turn it off.

"We are still sketching out exactly how this feature and its API counterpart works," said Stone in the post.

Any change isn't like to happen tomorrow, however, Stone comments:

"The first launch of this feature will probably be a limited subset of folks for a short period of time so we can get an idea of how it works from a system perspective".

Via: blog.twitter.com

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