Rumor: Twitter Close to Unveiling Contributions

Do I know for sure?  Absolutely not.  Do I have inside
information?  Absolutely not.  Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that
seemed to push me to think in this direction?  Yes.

Back in December, Twitter
blogged about its “feature
test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter.  One that
would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute
that post to the user who wrote it.

If you wanted to see this in action, all you would
have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of
the employees.

style="display: inline" title="image" alt="image"
src="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image_thumb1.png" width="500" height="217" />

They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @ href="http://twitter.com/CoTweet">CoTweet and @HootSuite. 
But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.

Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution
metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th.  HootSuite has only one, posted on
February 18th (none earlier, and none later).  This brings to mind:  Twitter must have
recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this
to be coincidence?

And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday,
March 1st 2009.

All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to
rolling out Contributions.  Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since
everybody already knows about it.  Then again, maybe they won’t.