Get ready for more re-tweeting
The quantity of people 're-tweeting' Twitter updates looks likely to increase as Twitter starts to roll out a new feature that will make it easier for people to copy people's status updates.
The site has announced that it is starting to trial a 're-tweet button' on a small percentage of accounts. If it is rolled out across all accounts it is likely that there will be much more 're-tweeting' of news and opinion, which could reach levels even higher than in the recent Jan Moir and Trafigura cases.
At present users have to manually copy and paste status updates, but the feature would allow users to do this at a click of a button. This could mean that re-tweeting becomes much more widespread, with a higher volume of re-tweets and even bigger 'Twitter uprisings' than we have seen so far.
Twitter founder Biz Stone said on the Twitter Blog: "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%."
He added: "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."
Screenshots of the new feature that is being tested can be found on the Marketing Shindig blog.
Twitter's new re-tweet feature is being tested on a small percentage of accounts. Image: Marketing Shindig
