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Twitter introduce the Follow Button
- startupcto 15y agoIt's just a button, is this really worth the hoopla? I find it funny how Twitter can make the deal out of the most ordinary thing, like Fail Whale and of course the "Follow Button".
- muppetman 15y agoI think this means Twitter has peaked. As in now they're trying hard to get existing users to "do more" (follow more people) because there's not many people signing up anymore. It's not like following people has been hard previously. In exactly the same way that Facebook now doesn't have many people signing up, so instead they desperately keep shoving "People you may know!" at you, even though you've never heard of Ima Stalker before.
- codelust 15y agoUser acquisition will always peak at some stage for most companies (the universe being the total number of people with access to the internet), so the attempt drive more usage is not surprising. I do believe, though, that Twitter has lost its way since end 2009 and are largely making stuff up as they go along. It is also fair to assume that they will have pressures to ramp up monetization as they run out of time to bridge the gap between potential and actual revenues. Such is the curse of an insanely high valuation.
- alain94040 15y agoagreed [when are the points coming back - 2600 to 1600 is a pretty clear vote]
- bxr 15y agoIt was a poll, not a vote. pg is going to do what he wants.
- instakill 15y agoFacebook has recently hit 700m users. How do they not have "many people signing up"?
- muppetman 15y agoI should have said "as many" - the stampede they had isn't there anymore.
- rradu 15y agoHow is this different than the follow button used on @Anywhere? http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin EDIT - It seems the flow is a little different. The user doesn't have to connect to the site first; it's just a one-click thing if you're already logged in. Pretty cool, except it seems a little buggy if you have SSL enabled on your Twitter account.
- abraham 15y agoI had some issues rendering the follow button with HTTPS only enabled too. After a couple of page refreshes it seemed to start working.
- agscala 15y agoThis will be nice for those of us who use twitter as simply a news stream rather than a social tool. If I like a blog, I'd rather click the follow button on the blog itself rather than looking up the username and doing it through the twitter profile page.
- esrauch 15y agoWhat advantages are there for using twitter rather than RSS for this purpose?
- akkartik 15y agoNobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more understandable feedreader (http://readwarp.com http://readwarp.com).
- kellysutton 15y agoI've found that many companies use RSS as an organizational format behind-the-scenes, but no consumers actually use it.
- zalew 15y agoI know what's your point, but I do use rss constantly and I don't find your page very usable, so maybe that's not the problem with your app.
- akkartik 15y agoYeah it was intended for people who don't understand RSS (or who, like me, subscribe to 800 feeds. The problems are the same at both ends of the spectrum). And yes I'm sure there's lots wrong with it. I built a recommendation system, but I stopped hacking on it when I realized that people liked a story more if I lied that their friend shared it. That's what twitter has: social proof.
- 15y ago
- ivankirigin 15y agoWeird that they have an option to choose a language rather than just detecting the language of the browser and automatically translating the button.
- jedschmidt 15y agoI think it makes more sense to have the button match the language of the page content. It would be a bit jarring to see a single Japanese button on an otherwise English page.
- aristidb 15y agoAlso, different button sizes can destroy layouts. Consider Facebook: "Like" in German becomes "Gefällt mir"...
- evanw 15y agoThe Follow button uses Twitter's "web intents" that have been available for a while now (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents). You can also use web intents to do things like compose, reply, retweet, or favorite a tweet.
- mrkurt 15y agoIt's a little slicker than intents since it's one click when you're logged in. It dumps you to the normal intent page when not logged in, though.