Twitter rolls out retweet feature

Popular micro-blogging site Twitter has announced it is rolling out an automated retweet feature on a limited number of accounts to see how it works in the wild.

In a blog posting, co-founder Biz Stone explained that the retweet button would make “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,” he added.

Back in August, Stone wrote that his team were working on a way to formalise the process of retweeting in order to enable smoother and more comprehensive access to information across the micro-blogging site.

The idea behind sharing these plans a few months ago was to get developers on board so they could think about how to incorporate the functionality into Twitter applications. However, the plan appears to have been held up somewhat, considering Stone promised in August that the automated retweet functionality would be available “in a few weeks or so”.

“Now we're ready to start trying it on Twitter,” wrote Stone. “The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we'll know right away. If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100 percent.”