Power of Twitter; Facebook is Testing a Retweet like Feature

Starting 16th Jan evening, Facebook has began testing what appears to be their version of Twitter’s Retweet feature, called: “via”. On any article shared by your friend, you can click on “Share” and when you post the article to your profile, Facebook will now automatically say who the article came from. While the “via” content only currently works on shared articles, I’d assume that this feature would be extended to other stream stories if initial user testing proves successful. This certainly looks like  Twitterfication of Facebook, and this appears to be one giant step in that process.

Not everyone has the ability at the moment, it has yet to appear in my account. You can check to see if you have it by going to your Facebook newsfeed and see if you have a button on links called “share.”

Guess what that button does? This is a small feature change by Facebook that will make promotion and data sharing on Facebook quite a bit more viral. It looks like this:

This marks one more movement by Facebook to integrate popular Twitter features into their ecosystem. Twitter touched a nerve with consumers, and Facebook is dedicated to staying on top of the latest trends. Given that Twitter turned down a Facebook offer, Facebook is just going to replicate what it could not buy.

This little feature can be huge, especially for Facebook fanpage as it adds a huge element to viral growth. Before this whenever someone shared something from a fanpage or profile, they would have to manually give credit, which many didn’t even know how. Now it will give credit by default and funny thing is although there is an option to remove the credit, many won’t know how to do that. So it’s a good thing because just like in the world of blogs an article should link where it’s due, in the world of social networks and information exchange, credit should be give in any form and this new feature certainly make it easier.

This feature should be rolling out to more users in the coming weeks. Of course, we can as always expect Facebook users to have a cow and a half about the changes. Past that, Facebook is dedicated to keeping ahead of the curve, lest a smaller company hurt their edge. Right now it appears as though all users have this feature although it was only recently turned on (at some point this evening). We’ll be sure to continue our ongoing coverage of Facebook’s Twitterfication.

However I doubt if simple “Twitterization” will cut it… Facebook perhaps has nothing to fear because the social system on Twitter is different. Connections (or follows) don’t have to be mutual, 140 characters will be odd to a core facebooker and most importantly Twitter isn’t for everyone! What do you think about Facebook’s Twitterfication?