Retweeting has never been officially supported by Twitter and instead came about organically because people wanted to share their friends’ tweets with their own followers while still giving credit to the original author. This has been standardized by putting “RT @originalauthor:” before the message or putting “(via @originalauthor)” after a message. Most Twitter clients include a quick way to do this and so retweeting has become very popular. Nevertheless, Twitter has yet to add native support for the feature on its website. It wasn’t until August that Twitter announced its plan to better integrate retweeting into the service.
Marcel Molina, who is a part of the Twitter platform team, has posted on the Twitter API Announcements Google Group saying that the retweet API launch is “close at hand” and that it is currently being tested by a select group of users. The update also announced changes to the API for Twitter client developers: whereas before each retweet of a tweet caused the tweet to appear once in a user’s timeline (therefore if a tweet was retweeted ten times, the user would see the tweet ten times), the tweet will now only appear once and retweets in the future will only update the tweet to show that there have been additional retweets (up to 100 retweets will be shown). Documentation on the new retweet API feature was also made available for developers.
The image below shows how the new feature may look when released:
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