retweeting

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more