The Retweet API launch is close at hand. You might have already seen some retweets appearing in the new statuses/home_timeline from people who've been testing them out. We've gotten lots of great questions and feedback about the retweet API. Thanks to everyone who has rolled up their sleeves and gotten involved. It's been a big help.
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. Here is the documentation for the new resource, statuses/retweets: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-retweets Sincere apologies if you've already written collapsing logic for retweets. Beta releases are beta releases and I think the retweet API is a lot better without the onerous collapsing requirement. To give you some ideas of how you can use the API to display retweets, here is a recent mock up of one of the potential UIs for the retweets timeline on twitter.com: http://a1.twimg.com/example-retweet-ui-18-sep-09.png If you've got questions, find bugs, or have any kind of feedback, get in touch via the dev mailing list, send an @reply to @twitterapi or jump into the #twitterapi IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. -- Marcel Molina Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/noradio