Webware

Retweeting has become such an important part of Twitter use that the social network announced on its blog late Thursday that its rollout of integrated retweeting has finally begun.

"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," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the blog. "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."

Right now, Twitter users are forced to manually retweet items they care about by inputting "RT" at the beginning of a message. Some sites use Tweetmeme's Retweet Button to make it a little easier for users to retweet stories they like. Earlier this year, Twitter shared the mechanics behind the new feature with third-party Twitter developers to see how they could integrate it in their own apps. It's about time that it's coming to Twitter.

In essence, the new retweet button will work much in the same way the "reply" option works on the site already. Users will need only to click the retweet button and their status-update box will be populated with the desired tweet. Those who have access to the feature are saying that a new icon is displayed before the message, rather than the typical RT, but since I don't have access to it yet, I can't confirm its existence.

Twitter plans to test the retweet option on a small number of accounts at first. If all goes well, it will "proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100 percent."

If you have access to the new feature, let us know what you think in the comments below.

A mockup of Twitter's new 'retweet API' interface

(Credit: Twitter)

The development team at Twitter has released a mockup of its forthcoming "retweet API"--basically, the first formal way that Twitter has baked retweets, the copying and attribution of other Twitter users' posts, into its own product. It displays the user avatars of members who have retweeted a given tweet below the original, "collapsing" them into a single space.

Some background detail on the forthcoming new API: Retweets have been a mainstay of Twitter for some time now, but the feature was created by users rather than officially. Several third-party Twitter clients have built in retweet buttons, and some apps, such as Tweetmeme, have created a way to tabulate them like a Digg count, but it's never been worked into Twitter's Web site or API.

What's interesting is that the new format, assuming that this is how the timeline ends up looking, can provide a quick, one-glance way to see just how influential a given Twitter user or individual tweet is, adding a new dimension to measuring Twitter influence beyond the follower count. If you see a lot of little retweet icons, for example, you might stop and take a closer look at a tweet (or the user behind that tweet) that you might otherwise have skimmed past.

What's also interesting is that it looks like retweet counts get cut off at 100, with higher ones displayed as simply "100+." I'm guessing that, say, CNN Breaking News generally gets a lot more than that.

When they were announced, the changes to Twitter retweets weren't met with a thoroughly warm reception. "Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated, and confusing," the forum post by Twitter's Marcel Molina said in response to developer concerns that the collapsed-retweet format would do more harm than good. "We're not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines, you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it."

There's some chest-thumping going on over at TweetMeme, a service that rounds up "retweets" of popular links--much like Digg buttons--and aggregates them into a central site. A rival site, ReTweet, just announced its impending launch, and TweetMeme thinks the two are too similar.

More specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme's Nick Halstead, ReTweet's "retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours." He said that TweetMeme is "seeking further legal advice."

Halstead says he was spurred by a commenter on a TechCrunch article who claims to have found the matching code.

ReTweet is not yet open to the public but claims that its product will be "off-da-hook."

Avid Twitter users are undoubtedly familiar with "retweeting," but here's a rundown: A retweet is a Twitter post (or tweet) that spreads around another user's tweet by posting "RT," the username of the account that originally posted the tweet, and then the content of the tweet (sometimes truncated so as to not push it above the 140-character limit).

TweetMeme has gained popularity because it makes Digg-like buttons that allow site visitors to send out retweets of articles or blog posts they may be reading, and industry blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable have begun installing TweetMeme buttons to count the number of retweets that a link has pulled in.

Halstead says the liaisons between the two Twitter app manufacturers go back a few months. "I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get Twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter," he wrote on the TweetMeme blog. "At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it."

ReTweet has said that the similarities in question came from the fact that the matching code was open-source.

Parent company Mesiab Labs responded in a blog post and says it has modified some code: "After some prompt discussions with our development team, we discovered that, indeed, one of our developers had based a prototype button and widget on tweetmeme.com's publicly viewable scripts and some of the same open source WordPress code," the post read. "As a company that prides itself on innovation and cutting edge development, we were a bit embarassed by the blunder, and promptly removed the scripts. Despite being well within our rights to use the publicly licensed code, we believe we can do better."

Since ReTweet has yet to even launch, this will have to be one to watch.

This post was updated at 12:52 p.m. PT.

Earlier this week, I came across the "Retweet button." Similar to the "Digg This" button, which adds a small Digg counter to articles after you embed JavaScript code, the Retweet button counts how many times a story has been retweeted on Twitter.

The Retweet Button was created by Tweetmeme, a service that aggregates links on Twitter to find popular topics sweeping through the microblog. Tweetmeme has a Wordpress plug-in to make it simple to include the button in any blog post, but the embed code can be added to any site.

Once a user clicks on the button, they're automatically redirected to their Twitter profile. A pre-written tweet is shown in their status update window saying, "RT @tweetmeme" followed by the title of the article and its link. After they update their stream, the Retweet counter adds one retweet to the tally.

There's a viral element to the Retweet button. A single user who retweets an article can drive thousands of people to the story, especially if the person's followers retweet as well. "Pass-along" traffic from retweets is becoming an important page view generator.

If you want to embed the Retweet button into your own posts, click here.

(Credit: Henry Chilcott)

Not only because a surgery conducted via Twitter made headlines the other day, Twitter is all the buzz (again). And it seems as if almost three years after its now-legendary debut at South by Southwest Interactive, the popular microblogging service has reached the second (or third) hype cycle, entering the business and media mainstream as the ultimate narrow--and broadcast--network.

As Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia and author of "Twitter Power," points out:

It's like the old saying, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." People who use Twitter as only a broadcast system are missing out on 95 percent of its benefits...It's about staying top of mind.

If a brand was to run an ad campaign, and it reached only 1,000 people, it wouldn't be doing so well, but a brand can do very well with 1,000 followers on Twitter because of who they are, and how conversions can reverberate within the community and outside the community.

Consequently, everyone's writing about Twitter again (on and off Twitter), but the conversation orientation has shifted from "what is it?" to "how to"--a sure sign that it will not experience the same slow decline as "Second Life."

A new Pew study on "Twitter and Status Updating" discovers that Twitter users tend to be younger and more mobile than the general Internet population. They also consume more news through the Internet and tend to engage in social activities online differently than everyone else.

The report further says the average Twitter user is "overwhelmingly young," though the average age of a Twitter user is slightly higher than users of most other social-networking services. (Twitter's median age is 31, while Facebook's is 26, and MySpace's is 27.)

Nearly one in five (19 percent) of online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20 percent of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35, with 10 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds and 5 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds using Twitter. The decline is even starker among older Internet users: 4 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds and 2 percent of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Yet these numbers are likely to change, as Ars Technica predicts:

Given another few years, it won't be surprising to see widespread Twitter use spread to older and more general Internet users in the same way text messaging has spread to parents and families.

In fact, Twitter often only involves sending an SMS in the first place--maybe some of those parents can keep the momentum going after texting their kids, and start sending updates to Twitter, while they're at it.

The Pew study indicates that there will not only be opportunities for vertical twittering geared toward professionals (Yammer) but also for services tailored to certain age groups: think of a Twitter for seniors to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren as the next killer app.

And then there is what you could call moderated twittering--in other words, attempts to tame the conversation monster for the sake of attracting advertisers. Glam Media monetized its feed for the Academy Awards by offering marketers the chance to sponsor a filtered or edited version of the message stream during the awards ceremony.

As VentureBeat notes, the ad network's editors chose which tweets showed up in the stream and purged those that were inappropriate or off-topic, making it safer for brand advertisers. Aveeno sponsored the Oscars Twitter widget; Glam says it plans to expand the service, dubbed gWire, to include FriendFeed and Facebook streams for future events.

Other innovative ways of twittering can be found in the realm of visualization. Elizabeth Baranik, for example, points out how the ASAE Great Ideas Conference used Twitterfountain for a visually richer feed.

The medium is new, but the challenge is old: it's all about being different. Attention is the currency of any online (and offline) social interaction, and on Twitter, being retweeted is the "sincerest form of flattery," as AlwaysOn puts it (while also providing some suggestions as to how to achieve that).

In the fast, new Twitter, ergo sum world, the formula goes: the more popular your status updates, the higher your social status.