EQUTE — Twitter is getting even more business friendly with co-tweets.

This is a wonderful addition to any tweeting company, instead of having one master account and a dedicated “tweetologist” or passing around the Twitter login (unwise).

Now people can be invited to tweet under the company Twitter account along with a byline. The benefits are endless in news organizations, segmented companies, blogger networks where there are many people involved in content that don’t necessarily interact. By allowing them to tweet under the company account it gives the account more depth, and if someone on a newspaper’s politics beat is tweeting great stuff, they will get their own followers and fans.

This neat trick could also scale to huge companies or franchises, allowing project leads or franchise managers tweet their hot sellers, or interesting stories — giving transparency, internal communication and valuable, personal information to followers.

On a grassroots level, the trick could be used to run a neighborhood watch or even a apartment twitter party.

Anamitra, of Twitter, described the feature (currently in beta) in the Twitter blog

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ — it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

It’s the next step beyond lists, giving tweeting organizations control of what their fans see beyond lists that still feature the ubiquitous “I like sandwiches and beer” comments.

One can only hope the feature is rolled out to the general public sooner than later.