Thousands of Twitter users logged on to the Twitter website today to discover that they had become, as if by magic, suddenly included in the ever-widening Project Retweet beta, which is Twitter's attempt to build retweets into the native architecture of Twitter. As with previous features like Lists, users who logged into Twitter via the Twitter.com website saw a message appearing above their timeline, explaining that they had been included in the beta. Additionally, users who actually had a new Project Retweet retweet in their timeline saw an additional box explaining why that tweet was showing up where it was.

So far, as expected, there isn't a lot of retweeting going on using the new Retweet feature, for a few simple reasons:

1. Most people don't actually use the Twitter website, and therefore don't realize that the feature exists at all. They don't read Twitter's blog and they don't get updates in their timeline about the new feature, so they don't really have any way of knowing that there's a new retweet feature at all.
2. For people who ARE using the Twitter website and making retweets using the new retweet feature, those retweets are only showing up in the timelines of other people who happen to also be using the website. That's a significantly smaller minority of people.

Until the Twitter clients that people actually use begin to support this feature, we're not going to see a great deal of retweeting going on. Judging by how slowly most of the desktop clients are implementing the new Lists feature - which is partially Twitter's fault, since the Lists feature is incomplete, lacking a way for Twitter users to actually discover lists - we don't expect to see the desktop clients supporting the new retweet feature until well into the holiday season. Add into that the fact that many people won't initially be aware of it and what we're seeing is a situation where it's going to take probably two or three months for a powerful new feature to enter mainstream use.

Regardless, it's very likely that once Twitter users DO catch on the to the fact that the new Twitter Retweet feature exists, a lot of them are going to switch over to it and begin using it immediately - although to what effect, we're not sure yet. Whether or not this is going to cut down on the amount of Retweet spam or simply change the nature and mode of the spam that is produced remains to be seen. Whether or not Twitter users will warm to the fact that they can no longer add their $.02 to a retweet is also uncertain, although I have to admit that after trying out the feature myself, I was a bit disappointed by the fact that I couldn't comment on what I was retweeting - meaning that I can't qualify anything that I retweet.

Most likely, what we're going to see is that a significant portion of retweets are going to change over to the new architecture, but in situations where users either don't like the feature or feel that they simply need to comment on the content of the retweet itself, they're going to stick with the original, homespun retweet system that's gotten us this far.