Nick Shin just wrote me mentioning he has the new Twitter retweet feature on his account, @marketwire. He wrote about it on his blog which you can read here. It would appear it works very much in a similar way to how Twitter original mentioned.
To start, users with this feature will have a message at the top of their stream mentioning they have the new features. Each Tweet in your timeline on Twitter.com will have a new “retweet” icon that appears similar to the “reply” link when you mouse over a Tweet. When you click on it, you are asked if you want to retweet the message. Click “yes”, and it gets popped at the top of your friends’ streams, along with a mention that you retweeted it (this is very similar to the way “likes” work on FriendFeed – the message keeps getting recycled so long as people keep liking it).
Underneath each message, it lists each user that retweeted the post. Instead of being icons of each user, it looks like Twitter is now going the FriendFeed method and listing out the text usernames of each user. This also brings more discovery potential for each user that retweeted it.
So, today marks the day Twitter grows even more like FriendFeed it would seem. I think this will eventually become even more powerful than the old-form “RT soandso” format because it is much easier to just click a button than type text, but we’ll see how frequently people use this and if the old style continues to be tradition as it is today. “Retweets” are the new like. Do you have it? Do you “like” the new retweet feature?
The images above are just 2 of the images listed on Nick Shinn’s blog. Be sure to check out his blog for more screenshots and info. You can follow him on Twitter here.
