Twitter rolls out retweet feature, slowly

Access granted to a "very small percentage of accounts"

6 November 2009 9:48 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Twitter has announced on its blog that it's beginning the rollout of its promised retweets feature. The company said: "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".

Retweets originally developed inside the Twitter community, rather than with the company. They indicate when a person wants to quote another person verbatim - usually sharing news or a link. The syntax is: "RT @username message". It has led to people often shortening their tweets even more to allow for space for a retweet.

The new feature would integrate the functionality in the API and web interface. While many third party Twitter clients already support retweets, there's still a substantial percentage of users who don't understand the functionality. We'll let you know when that "small percentage" begins to increase.

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