I've been looking at data acquired from the "sample" feed. In those tweets, I've discovered something, and I wanted to run it by Twitter and see if this is an official, documented API feature.
When a tweet is a retweet using the retweet button on the web page, there is an extra key-value pair in a returned tweet. I've been handling them as JSON objects (in Perl), but I suspect other formats do the same. The key is "retweeted_status", and the value is an *entire* object containing the original tweet that was retweeted. If a tweet was not a retweet, this extra key-value pair isn't there. Questions: 1. Is this official, documented behavior, or did I discover it on my own? 2. Is it likely to change? 3. Why is the *entire* original tweet given as the value? Wouldn't it be enough to give the tweet ID and let the app go hunt for it if necessary?
