Back in August we announced plans to release the Retweet feature along with an API to publish and consume retweets. Over the last few months we've been gradually opening up the feature to more users as we performance test and refine it. You can see some of the original announcement emails around retweets here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/1e07e332ec3d449d# http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/08540da9d7d64c46# http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/3641a248d555da20# http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/46928276a4c78df2#
Today we've launched the feature to 100% of users. You can now consume retweets via the /statuses/home_timeline resource, as well as all the specialized retweet timelines. For backwards compatibility reasons we're stripping retweets out of the friends_timeline resource as well as the user_timeline resource. If you plan on implementing support for consuming retweets from timelines, switch all instances of /statuses/friends_timeline to /statuses/home_timeline. All the relevant retweet documentation can be found here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweet http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-home_timeline http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweeted_by_me http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweeted_to_me http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweets_of_me http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweets To those implementing this feature in your clients, I'd suggest taking some UI cues from what we've done on Twitter.com: http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/differentiating-retweets.png Notice how the retweet by @ablegrape of @wblakegray's tweet is clearly differentiated from the surrounding tweets with a distinctive retweet icon and the "Retweeted by" label along the bottom. This is just one way of doing it. Use whatever interface you think makes sense. What's important is communicating to your users that the tweet they are seeing was shared with them by someone they follow so they don't get confused by seeing tweets in their timeline from people they aren't following. We're just getting started with the retweet feature but we're happy with this initial v1 we pushed out. We're really looking forward to seeing how everyone works with this new API. -- Marcel Molina Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/noradio
