Twitter is of course in the process of rolling out a new retweet feature. The feature adds a retweet button to each tweet on your timeline, much like the "reply" button that has always been there. However, one distinct difference between these two buttons is that where the reply button fills out your form with the proper information ("@username"), the retweet button sends the initial tweet to your followers' timelines without giving you your own tweet.
Update 3: Twitter is now telling me that I am part of a beta test group for the retweet features, so I guess it is no longer on hold.
Those who are part of the test get the following message:
Back in June, Hubspot shared data, which indicated that about one and a half percent of all tweets were retweets. I'd be surprised if that number hasn't increased in the last few months. More people are adopting Twitter and becoming familiar with the Twitter culture. More tools have come out, which cater to the easy re-tweet. More sites have adopted retweet buttons, such as the one from Tweetmeme. I seriously doubt people are retweeting less.
Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters "RT" to somebody else's tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. "Some of Twitter's best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate.
TweetMeme didn't take the launch of Retweet.com lightly. As the new entity comes in to step right on their toes, TweetMeme points to some solid numbers, a list of differentiating features, and announces an upcoming analytics package.
Update: Retweet.com is now live.
Original Article: First Twitter ignited the URL-shortening service fire, and now a similar phenomenon appears to be happening with "retweeting" services. Retweet.com is reportedly set to launch today.
Twitter announced that it intends to add a retweet option to its service as well as the API. Retweeting has basically become a huge part of the Twitter culture, but it is not a function that is readily available on Twitter itself.
Users have to actually take the time and to enter the information themselves. Co-founder Biz Stone acknowledges that this can be "cumbersome". Twitter is calling the initiative "project retweet." Stone explains on the Twitter Blog:
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