Twitter Developers Get Access To Project Retweet

Taking a cue from Google's announcement earlier this week about search engine Caffeine, Twitter unveiled "project retweet," a way to formalize the retweeting process. Twitter says it will officially add it to the platform at Twitter.com, although the feature is not quite ready for release.

Retweeting allows twitters to call attention to a specific tweet by copying and pasting another post into your tweet box, "What are you dong?" The retweeter references the original author with a @mention and RT. The process works, but is a bit cumbersome -- and not everyone knows about it, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post Thursday.

The initial phase of project retweet is to show twitterers and the developer community how the feature will work through an application programming interface (API), as well as a user perspective.

Here's how it works: "Let's say you follow @jessverr, @biz (that's me), and @gregpass but you don't follow @ev. However, I do follow @ev and the birth of his baby boy was so momentous that I retweeted it to all my followers," Stone writes. "Note 'retweeted by' attribution and 'retweet' option. Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You'd see @ev's tweet even though you don't follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have."

Stone says the feature should launch in a few weeks. Twitter will likely limit the first launch to a "subset of folks for a short period of time" to get an idea of how it works with the platform. After kicking the tires a bit to make sure it works, the feature will launch to all members.

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