Twitter's plan to formally adopt the retweet as a feature, aka "Project Retweet," has just become a lot more clear.

Today on Twitter's API Announcement Group, the company outlined in greater detail what their version of the retweet will look like and how it will function. The retweet is already central to sharing content on Twitter, but confusion and the mess surrounding the syntax have prompted them to build this feature.

Oh, and to help explain the updates to the retweet feature, they've provided a mock-up of the latest design. So what's in store for the new retweet feature? As we explained in our detailed guide of Project Retweet, "retweet" will appear as an option at the end of any tweet. Clicking this will share that tweet in your Twitter stream, just like a normal retweet would. However, it will not come with the "RT @username" syntax we've come to recognize.

Instead, it will look like this:







Twitter also offered an apology to third party developers. Why, you ask? Because they changed functionality in the API. Before today, they were asking developers to do "internal book keeping" on whether a retweet had already come in multiple times. Now that work will be done on Twitter's end. They also are limiting the number of shown retweets to 100, so that you don't have a single tweet with 1500+ faces and username shown as retweeters.

Here's Twitter's explanation:

"One of the main confusions and criticisms about the retweet API was around what happens when a given tweet is retweeted multiple times. The explanation was that developers need to do their own retweet collapsing. If N people retweet a given tweet, you'd get N instances of that same tweet in the appropriate retweet timeline and the home timeline. You would then have to do your own internal book keeping about whether that tweet had already come in. If it hadn't you'd display it for the first time. If it had you'd update the already displayed tweet. Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated and confusing. We're not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it."

The launch of Project Retweet is close at hand. Do you like the new look of retweets? Do you think this is a good or bad development? Let us know in the comments.