

Pushing Our (Tweet) Button - mrduncan
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/pushing-our-tweet-button.html

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relix
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> less informative than
<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.

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abraham
From what I recall Twitter is planning on wrapping every single URL going
through their system with t.co but include the youtu.be link in the status
metadata when applications pull from the API. The youtu.be URL will be
displayed to users but will be sent to t.co first then redirected to youtu.be.

~~~
jalada
This is correct. Once clients adopt it (we do, at Twitterfall), this will in
some ways improve how informative URLs are, as each tweet object will contain
the actual URL the t.co link points to in the metadata, allowing clients to
display that, essentially overcoming the 140 char limit.

Of course, you are free to use your own ahortnener; the t.co link will
redirect to shortened links too (adding another layer of redirection is a bit
of a pain though)

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harscoat
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
I'd be happy to learn, why the downvote on datasift?

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c1sc0
Because you're off-topic & thread-jacking, my friend.

~~~
rradu
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/>

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wensing
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).

~~~
freejoe76
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> ), 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."

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msy
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.

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nostromo
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.

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rradu
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

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thesethings
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
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
Ah, thanks for the rapid reply. (HN is so cool :).

I think the Posterous set-up is what confused my sense of the relationship.

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brianbreslin
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.

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samratjp
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.

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fookyong
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?

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retube
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?

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thwarted
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.

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tmsh
Overlay sounds so much better than popup...

