Yesterday we told you that Twitter was going to launch Official retweet buttons and today it has been officially announced on the Twitter blog.

The official tweet button for Twitter is in partnership with Tweetmeme who are one of the biggest providers of the "Retweet" button for websites all across the world. Tweetmeme also accounts for 750 million daily retweet button impressions. It definitely made more sense for Twitter to use the technology behind Tweetmeme, since it also accounted for shortened URLs.

In future, all Tweetmeme buttons will redirect to Twitter’s "Retweet" button by default and the Tweetmeme team will continue to work with Twitter on the Retweet button and other projects.

The Retweet button from Twitter is easy to integrate and makes use of Twitter’s own URL shorterner t.co, which it also uses to provide a brilliant spam protection mechanism. If you want to make use of the official Twitter Retweet button, head over to this link and create your own. Watch a video of the official Retweet button in action below.

About a month ago, I had posted about the first screenshot of the Retweet feature of Twitter. Now, my account was finally hacked into by those sneaky Twitter devs, and I have the new Retweet feature! Here’s a first look post at what makes it slicker than the resident Retweet features of the various Twitter clients available.

I really like the headers that come with new features on Twitter. I really like them. It has this warm and fuzzy feeling glued to it; like listening to a Stephen Fry Podgram. Jokes apart, it is an excellent way of telling Twitter users what exactly is this new feature and how it will help them. The header is pretty self-explanatory, so go ahead and read it!

Here is the first example of a Retweet on my home page. HeadStarters is not a Twitter profile that I follow, however, iMBA (a Twitter user that I do follow) thought this was worth retweetingand that is the reason why I see this on my Home timeline. I do not know how this works since I do not want to have a barrage of unwanted retweets on my Home page, but I’m sure Twitter will have a filtering feature soon.

The Retweetbutton in its full glory on Keith’s tweet on my Home page. Notice our editor-in-chief’s dilemmatic question in his tweet and the cute puppies on his display picture!

After retweeting the tweet, I see that on my profile page, it shows up with the retweet icon, the Twitter user’s name and the Undo button that Tehseen mentioned. Nifty! Especially when you retweet the wrong tweet.

Here it is the Retweets sidebar button. Clicking this button leads you straight to…

…this page! As mentioned in the earlier post, the new feature indeed has the Retweets by others, Retweets by youand Your tweets, retweetedtabs! The HeadStarters tweet comes under the Retweets by otherstab along with several other Retweets from people I follow.

And finally, the Retweets by youpage which features a lone retweet. There will be several more to come, I’m sure!

So, the Retweet features is indeed well-designed with organization and optimization at heart. The Twitter wagon will keep chugging along as soon as the third-party clients modify their apps to reflect this new change in the API. Perhaps we shall see more innovations there as they recreate this feature in their apps. Twitter has not put up the Retweet feature on their mobile site. However, with the maintenance window announced today, I’m hoping they do have the feature up there.

Twitter started rolling out the retweet feature on its website just last week. A lot of users still have not gotten the feature on their Twitter account and now the question is, when would they?

A lot of users who had gotten the retweet feature recently noticed that the retweet button had disappeared. Now, Twitter has also confirmed that they have temporarily disabled the feature. They have explained on their blog that they had to take down the feature due to some problems. Once they are resolved, the feature would be re-enabled for those who already had it and after that the incremental roll out would continue.

What do you think, is Twitter back to having problems again?

In case of   Twitter, almost all the new features have been created by 3rd party apps. Twitter adopts a feature on its main platform, only after it has been in the market for a few months. The latest one to go through this strategy is the “Retweet” feature.

All the 3rd party apps like TweetDeck, NetVibes e.t.c. already allow you to Retweet with a single click. Twitter, however, has just started rolling out the Retweet feature today. A lot of people who logged into their Twitter accounts today saw a Retweet link next to reply.

An interesting twist, however, comes with the undo feature for your retweets. Yes! if you think you have retweeted by mistake, simply click undo and your action will reverse.

Twitter has been playing around with its features for some time now. The most recent that comes to mind is the change of Replies to Mentions whereby Twitter officially accommodated the usage of the @reply in mentioning users instead of just replying to them. While this change has been mostly cosmetic, Twitter’s new upcoming API that bestows upon the developer the power of Retweets.

Alright, so that was unnecessarily dramatic, but a screenshot released by Twitter’s developer Marcel Molina shows exactly what the new API in Twitter’s timeline could do. Retweets are basically tweets from other users that you decide to share on your own timeline because they are either one or a combination of awesome/hilarious/interesting/WTH-inducing links or text. These tweets are prefixed with an RT and @username, username being the user whose tweet is being retweeted. These have become a very popular way of sharing interesting-ness on Twitter.

So without further ado, on with the screenshot!

As you can see from the picture, there are three tabs in the Retweet column Retweets by others (most probably your friends), Retweets by you and Your tweets, retweeted (both self-explanatory). You can also note that in the Latestnotification, there is no RTbefore SarahKSilverman, and the username itself is in bold signifying that there will not be any necessity for an RT before the name of the user. Again, simple statistics about the number of retweets (to a maximum of 100) and the users who have retweeted (with a maximum of 32 avatars displayed on the starting page) are shown and the appearance of the quirky Twitter Bird cannot be missed.

Look out for this new feature coming to your Twitter profile soon!

Well this picture should speak better words than what I want to convey.

I saw this on the newly launched Retweet.com which is a direct competitor to Tweetmeme both of which aggregate links on twitter and show them Digg style to the users.

However looks like Retweet.com has a lot of work to do before they can even come close to the quality that is maintained on Tweetmeme. What is your take on this, do you like Tweetmeme or Retweet.com better?

With the growth of Twitter, a lot of services related to it also experienced the glory. TweetMeme is one such service that, due to its excellent service saw a phenomenal growth in popularity. Almost every other technology blog has a TweetMeme button installed that users use to retweet an article.

Today though, a competitor has launched with full vigor and force. ReTweet is a new service that is trying to compete with TweetMeme in retweeting links. The major advantage that ReTweet has is their domain name ReTweet.com

Their website and functionality appears to be very similar, infact just like a clone of TweetMeme. However, unlike TweetMeme they only offer one way to add their button to your website, that is by copying the Javascript. Thats’s right! No plugins yet for WordPress but they are promised to be coming soon.

To strengthen themselves, ReTweet has launched a $10,000 lucky draw in which all the bloggers who swith to ReTweet can participate.

We all love to show off our Feedburner subscription count, twitter follower count so how about a way to tell users how many times your blogs content was shared on twitter?

Tweetmeme the popular service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular and allow users to retweet them also offers users with a retweet chicklet to show of the number of times your blog URLs are shared on twitter.

To generate a retweet chicklet visit the chicklet generator page and enter your blog/website URL, choose the color for your chicklet and click on the generate button.

Once the code is generated, just copy it and paste it anywhere on your blog, definitely nice way to show the popularity of your blog on twitter.