Conceived by the Twitter community, retweets have become an important part of the site’s ecosystem. On Thursday, Biz Stone announced on the Twitter blog that they will be integrating retweets into the service and application programming interface. As it stands, Project Retweet is just in phase 1, in which Twitter will take feedback from the developer community on how the API will handle them.

A sketch of how the new retweet functionality might look.

(Credit: Twitter Blog)

Twitter has published an update to its API documentation, including new details on how the various aspects of retweeting will work. As Twitter gathers more feedback from developers, it plans to roll it out to a limited segment of users to ensure that the service’s performance isn’t adversely affected.

Twitter has been quick to respond to and embrace user-invented features in the past, with @replies and hashtags, so it’s nice to see that it is taking a similar route with retweets. Retweets can often be one of the most unclear aspects of Twitter for new users, so hopefully integrating it with the service can help to alleviate some of that initial confusion.

A mockup of retweeting.

(Credit: Twitter API Google Group)

Originally posted at The Web Services Report