@ev announced today on the Twitter blog that the microblogging company works at implementing an Phase 1 of the official Retweet project. Although details haven’t been finalized yet, Evan Williams showed a sketch of the possible future integration, all while admitting that the users and the Twitter community basically decide what Twitter becomes.
Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.
From the sketch presented by @ev, and the explanation, it seems that Twitter plans to show all retweets in your stream, even if you don’t follow the people who retweeted. I for one can not say that I am looking forward to even more (RT) noise in my Twitter feed but am happy that the company plans to fight fake retweets.
The Retweet option will also officially be implemented in the Twitter API.
No official release date has been announced yet but the company plans to test the feature on a small scale before launching. Hopefully I am not among the testers unless I can turn retweets from people I do not follow off.
The company also posted mockups for the implementation to the the Twitter Dev Google Group. This looks a lot cleaner already than the sketch posted above.
Is this Twitter trying to look like Facebook and ‘likes’?
