Report: Twitter adds Retweet to Share Tweets and some strange tweets in your timeline

5 days ago twitter enables the Re-tweet functionality in few selected accounts but there were some issues so Retweet feature temporarily disabled by the twitter. After the continuous fixation/development of the work there were some reports of the missing “in reply to” links. Today twitter officially rolls that there will be a maintenance window Tuesday, November 17th at 11p Pacific.

twitter-maintenance-windowNow when twitter rolls out the features of “Retweet to Share Tweets” on accounts then we get to know than why there was the maintenance today. (though i predicted that there might be server additions or any feature launch)

Now when you login through the web interface of twitter then you will notice the following status on the top of your homepage i.e “New! Retweet to share tweets (BETA)”

retweet to share

How to track the tweets by icons

Twitter has its specific icon for the re tweets. For example observe my following tweet and the recycle type icon on the start.re tweet icon

What is the official reaction of twitter?

In an official post by @Biz, (co-founder of Twitter) he described the importance of re tweet button and reasons for limited roll outs. He stated that:

Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, 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.
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%.

Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, 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.

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%.

Now when you check your timeline then you will notice some strange tweets in your timeline. Don’t waste your brain in cross checking whether you follow that tweep or not. This is the simple addon feature introduced by the retweet and share options.

The sample of strange tweet may look like this:

twitter-timeline
Twitter already know about the growing number of twitter applications and their innovative features. In a post hubspot released some New Data on Top Twitter Applications and Usage where they described that how do people use twitter and top applications used for tweeting. Following are the two graphs by hubspot research report:

how do people use twitter

Top tweeting applications
Conclusion: There are many twitter applications for business , top twitter applications according to usage and many top twitter clients according to stats reports but its great to know that official of twitter are rolling out some essential features in there default web client.

Update 1

After the Re tweet feature there are few new changes, have a look over the screenshot

Some new twitter features

Update 2

There are few UI issues on live accounts. For example observe the floating and css issues on the following screenshots

issues in tweeter UI

Update 3

Finally the issue is resolved and its due to corrupted CSS files.

Note: Most of the people reported that they issues are due to the bad css load but they don’t observed the new features like Inbox, Sent, Retweets by Other, Retweets by you and Your tweets retweeted.

Conclusion: There were new features but due to stylesheet loading problem all things appears to wierd and messed up. Vitor Lorenco, product designer at Twitter also reported in his tweet about the css uploading issue. Many times we face similar css issues on sites due to corrupted css uploads. Might be twitter had an error in the connection due to which few data packets were loosed while uploading the files.


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