Facebook Is Launching Its Own "Retweet" Button

Mark Zuckerburg speaks during an onstage interview James Bennet of the Atlantic magazine in Wasington

Facebook now has an important new feature  that works just like Twitter‘s well-known “retweet”. At the bottom of any post inside Paper, you can tap an arrow symbol to bring up a Share dialog and then tap Reshare to share the post with your friends and followers.


Tapping Reshare is as simple as tapping Retweet on Twitter

Reshare is similar to the “Share on your own Timeline” option on Facebook’s website and the “Share Now” option in Facebook’s mobile apps, but is markedly different because of its one-tap simplicity and its use of the familiar retweet symbol. “Share on your own Timeline,” for example, asks you to write a comment before sharing a post you’ve found — while tapping Reshare is as simple as tapping retweet on Twitter. Perhaps with a more literal name and symbol alongside it, people will use the feature more, as Facebook seems to be betting.

Reshare is far from the first time Facebook has imitated or cloned a Twitter feature: the company recently launched hashtags and Trending Topics, as well as @-mentions to link to friends’ profiles. We don’t have screenshots of Reshare since we only had a brief glimpse of Paper when Facebook demoed it for us, but check back on Monday when the app launches for continued coverage. The company says it has “no current plans” to explicitly bring Re-share to Facebook on other platforms yet.

Source: News Wire