5 ms·

Pushing Our (Tweet) Button

58 points by mrduncan 16y ago

retube 16y ago
I'm sure lots of sites will incorporate this. But why not just do a browser add-on/extension, that would allow you to share any link from any page?
- jamiequint 16y ago
  There are existing 3rd party browser extensions that do this, in any case your average internet user does not use browser extensions or even know what they are.
- sandofsky 16y ago
  First entry at: http://extensions.apple.com/ http://extensions.apple.com/
- thwarted 16y ago
  It's called a bookmarklet, and it's been around for years, and lets you share on any site, not just one(s) the website has considered it worth their time to integrate with.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
samratjp 16y ago
Man, this was a long time coming - but I do hope twitter will embed links smartly - as in a la facebook style preview of a page snippet or play youtube from twitter itself.
harscoat 16y ago
the big news imho is "Datasift" (twitter partnering with tweetmeme for): "Scalable platform for developers to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of status updates sent every day. * Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language * Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP * Comment upon and rank streams created by the community * Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams DataSift is designed to work at scale, serving hundreds of thousands of real-time streams and processing millions of rules every second. We hope that the product will allow developers to focus on the building of amazing new user experiences and let us worry about delivering the right content to the right person."
- harscoat 16y ago
  I'd be happy to learn, why the downvote on datasift?
  - c1sc0 16y ago
    Because you're off-topic & thread-jacking, my friend.
    - rradu 16y ago
      Pretty on topic considering tweetmeme wrote a blog post about the new twitter button and Datasift together: http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2010/08/12/twitter-tweet-button/ http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2010/08/12/twitter-tweet-button/
msy 16y ago
I wonder if they're going to be doing the same sneaky tracking via cookies and iframe that the Like Button does irrespective of whether you actually interact with it or not.
- nostromo 16y ago
  AddThis (acquired by ClearSpring) is doing this as well. It goes even further by injecting an invisible Flash object that's just there to set a Flash Cookie that 99.9% of users don't know how to delete. The shadiness of all of this tracking should give us all pause before we plaster our websites with these widgets.
relix 16y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't find an option to disable using Twitter's own shortening service? As an extreme example, I find http://t.co/gpRQitG http://t.co/gpRQitG less informative than http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0 http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0. If your site is still only at 3 characters ID, unlike Youtube, having a custom shortened domain from which users can tell what it is, generally, what they're clicking on, is a much better user experience than using a universal shortener which says nothing about the content.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  I know Twitter wants to have maximum trackability and extensibility for shortened links, but I think the best way to do it would be to offer a secondary API to sites that have their own identifiable shortlink domain. Instead of just building in the tweet button, a site could hook into a Twitter shortlink API, which would let Twitter run its analytics and implement future functionality while the site continues to generate URIs through its own youtu.be, flic.kr, etc. domain.
  - relix 16y ago
    They could actually exploit it as a business feature. Make the flic.kr domain point to Twitter's servers, who implement the shortening service, and allow the business users to view lots of interesting stats, in relation with tweets. Stuff the business on its own could never gather without access to Twitter's extensive database of tweets. This way both win. Twitter could charge for it as well.
    - mortenjorck 16y ago
      That's... one of the best Twitter monetization ideas I've heard. It pushes Twitter's real-time social analytics value to businesses while obviously strengthening a company's brand on Twitter. If the Tweet Button catches on, it could be a very easy sell.
      - relix 16y ago
wensing 16y ago
How do you get around the problem of one of these widgets taking forever to load and slowing down your site's render time? I noticed with the "Like" button that it was, on average, too slow to use on our home page. Am I doing it wrong? We have a "Tweet this" link above our maps that has been getting good usage, and costs us nothing in terms of YADNSLU (yet another DNS lookup).
- smokinn 16y ago
  Facebook's stuff was slowing the page down? I didn't notice much of a difference on my site. Were you using the async javascript version?
- freejoe76 16y ago
  The way I look at it is: An in-house same-domain solution's the slickest and fastest.... but you lose out on any network-effect recommendations. That said, facebook widgets are ridiculously expensive in terms of domain lookups and requests. But back to the topic of tweet buttons. Twitter's 3-request button beats the heck out of the Tweetmeme iframe+javascript franken-thing. I just looked on Tweetmeme's site ( http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button ), and even they recommend using the twitter button: "We recommend using the Twitter Tweet Button. You can find more details about it on the Twitter goodies page."
rradu 16y ago
The counts are waaay off. I'm using tweetmeme for one of my sites, and while that shows 150 tweets for one page the Twitter widget shows 11
- thesethings 16y ago
  Yeah. You're not the only one saying this. Tweetmeme uses Backtype data, right? (At least when used through Posterous it seems to.) Also, on Twitter's blog, it says Tweetmeme is now "pointing" to the Twitter button. But it's not totally, otherwise we couldn't get our counts like we are.
  - konsl 16y ago
    We (BackType) don't power Tweetmeme's button — we offer our own, more accurate one. The counts we do are also available via our API, which powers Posterous' button.
    - thesethings 16y ago
      Ah, thanks for the rapid reply. (HN is so cool :). I think the Posterous set-up is what confused my sense of the relationship.
- avibryant 16y ago
  What's the URL? I can try to look into the discrepancy.
brianbreslin 16y ago
can someone explain the "business arrangement" they made with tweetmeme? will tweetmeme get their data in exchange for showing them how to build this? (they say the new code is 100% original to twitter though).... also curious as to why twitter didn't BUY tweetmeme.
tmsh 16y ago
Overlay sounds so much better than popup...
fookyong 16y ago
So what does this mean for Backtype and Tweetmeme? I gather that Tweetmeme has some kind of partner deal... but what are the particulars? Is it short term or long term?

58 points by mrduncan 16y ago

I'm sure lots of sites will incorporate this. But why not just do a browser add-on/extension, that would allow you to share any link from any page?

jamiequint 16y ago
There are existing 3rd party browser extensions that do this, in any case your average internet user does not use browser extensions or even know what they are.
sandofsky 16y ago
First entry at: http://extensions.apple.com/ http://extensions.apple.com/
thwarted 16y ago
It's called a bookmarklet, and it's been around for years, and lets you share on any site, not just one(s) the website has considered it worth their time to integrate with.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

samratjp 16y ago

Man, this was a long time coming - but I do hope twitter will embed links smartly - as in a la facebook style preview of a page snippet or play youtube from twitter itself.

harscoat 16y ago

the big news imho is "Datasift" (twitter partnering with tweetmeme for): "Scalable platform for developers to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of status updates sent every day. * Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language * Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP * Comment upon and rank streams created by the community * Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams DataSift is designed to work at scale, serving hundreds of thousands of real-time streams and processing millions of rules every second. We hope that the product will allow developers to focus on the building of amazing new user experiences and let us worry about delivering the right content to the right person."

harscoat 16y ago
I'd be happy to learn, why the downvote on datasift?
- c1sc0 16y ago
  Because you're off-topic & thread-jacking, my friend.
  - rradu 16y ago
    Pretty on topic considering tweetmeme wrote a blog post about the new twitter button and Datasift together: http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2010/08/12/twitter-tweet-button/ http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2010/08/12/twitter-tweet-button/

msy 16y ago

I wonder if they're going to be doing the same sneaky tracking via cookies and iframe that the Like Button does irrespective of whether you actually interact with it or not.

nostromo 16y ago
AddThis (acquired by ClearSpring) is doing this as well. It goes even further by injecting an invisible Flash object that's just there to set a Flash Cookie that 99.9% of users don't know how to delete. The shadiness of all of this tracking should give us all pause before we plaster our websites with these widgets.

relix 16y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't find an option to disable using Twitter's own shortening service? As an extreme example, I find http://t.co/gpRQitG http://t.co/gpRQitG less informative than http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0 http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0. If your site is still only at 3 characters ID, unlike Youtube, having a custom shortened domain from which users can tell what it is, generally, what they're clicking on, is a much better user experience than using a universal shortener which says nothing about the content.

mortenjorck 16y ago
I know Twitter wants to have maximum trackability and extensibility for shortened links, but I think the best way to do it would be to offer a secondary API to sites that have their own identifiable shortlink domain. Instead of just building in the tweet button, a site could hook into a Twitter shortlink API, which would let Twitter run its analytics and implement future functionality while the site continues to generate URIs through its own youtu.be, flic.kr, etc. domain.
- relix 16y ago
  They could actually exploit it as a business feature. Make the flic.kr domain point to Twitter's servers, who implement the shortening service, and allow the business users to view lots of interesting stats, in relation with tweets. Stuff the business on its own could never gather without access to Twitter's extensive database of tweets. This way both win. Twitter could charge for it as well.
  - mortenjorck 16y ago
    That's... one of the best Twitter monetization ideas I've heard. It pushes Twitter's real-time social analytics value to businesses while obviously strengthening a company's brand on Twitter. If the Tweet Button catches on, it could be a very easy sell.
    - relix 16y ago

wensing 16y ago

How do you get around the problem of one of these widgets taking forever to load and slowing down your site's render time? I noticed with the "Like" button that it was, on average, too slow to use on our home page. Am I doing it wrong? We have a "Tweet this" link above our maps that has been getting good usage, and costs us nothing in terms of YADNSLU (yet another DNS lookup).

smokinn 16y ago
Facebook's stuff was slowing the page down? I didn't notice much of a difference on my site. Were you using the async javascript version?
freejoe76 16y ago
The way I look at it is: An in-house same-domain solution's the slickest and fastest.... but you lose out on any network-effect recommendations. That said, facebook widgets are ridiculously expensive in terms of domain lookups and requests. But back to the topic of tweet buttons. Twitter's 3-request button beats the heck out of the Tweetmeme iframe+javascript franken-thing. I just looked on Tweetmeme's site ( http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button ), and even they recommend using the twitter button: "We recommend using the Twitter Tweet Button. You can find more details about it on the Twitter goodies page."

rradu 16y ago

The counts are waaay off. I'm using tweetmeme for one of my sites, and while that shows 150 tweets for one page the Twitter widget shows 11

thesethings 16y ago
Yeah. You're not the only one saying this. Tweetmeme uses Backtype data, right? (At least when used through Posterous it seems to.) Also, on Twitter's blog, it says Tweetmeme is now "pointing" to the Twitter button. But it's not totally, otherwise we couldn't get our counts like we are.
- konsl 16y ago
  We (BackType) don't power Tweetmeme's button — we offer our own, more accurate one. The counts we do are also available via our API, which powers Posterous' button.
  - thesethings 16y ago
    Ah, thanks for the rapid reply. (HN is so cool :). I think the Posterous set-up is what confused my sense of the relationship.
avibryant 16y ago
What's the URL? I can try to look into the discrepancy.

brianbreslin 16y ago

can someone explain the "business arrangement" they made with tweetmeme? will tweetmeme get their data in exchange for showing them how to build this? (they say the new code is 100% original to twitter though).... also curious as to why twitter didn't BUY tweetmeme.

tmsh 16y ago

Overlay sounds so much better than popup...

fookyong 16y ago

So what does this mean for Backtype and Tweetmeme? I gather that Tweetmeme has some kind of partner deal... but what are the particulars? Is it short term or long term?