Twitter starts rolling out new format for retweets

It hasn't been long since we told you about Twitter's "Project Retweet," the plan to introduce a standard, system-wide format for rebroadcasting other users' Twitter postings. The new retweets seem to have already rolled out for certain power users. Although you might not see them on the web, they're already showing up in some third-party Twitter clients. Until the new retweets are available to all users, they might look a little confusing, because they show up on the retweeter's page, but appear to be posted by the original poster.

It's a little weird to see posts from users you don't follow in the streams of users you do, but it will all become clear when this format is available on the web. That's because, instead of "RT" in the body of the post, it will be marked as a retweet in a smaller font size underneath. Space-conscious tweeters should be happy to save those two extra characters, and third-party services will no longer have to put together hacky retweet support.

One of the first users to get access to Project Retweet was Daring Fireball's John Gruber. Visiting his page using some third-party Twitter clients should give you an idea of what the new feature looks like.

[via Mashable]

Tags: gruber, retweet, twitter