

Twitter introduce the Follow Button - wlll
https://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/cb481a72e0d45cf2

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muppetman
I 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.

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codelust
User 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.

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alain94040
agreed [when are the points coming back - 2600 to 1600 is a pretty clear vote]

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bxr
It was a poll, not a vote. pg is going to do what he wants.

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rradu
How is this different than the follow button used on @Anywhere?
<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.

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abraham
I had some issues rendering the follow button with HTTPS only enabled too.
After a couple of page refreshes it seemed to start working.

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agscala
This 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.

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esrauch
What advantages are there for using twitter rather than RSS for this purpose?

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akkartik
Nobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more
understandable feedreader (<http://readwarp.com>).

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gchucky
Oh come on. We've had this discussion about RSS before
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060298> was the last big one), and
plenty of people are using it in some capacity.

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akkartik
Perhaps I should have rephrased: few people use RSS. Orders of magnitude fewer
than those using twitter. Do you agree?

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evgen
An order of magnitude fewer people use RSS than use Twitter, but fewer people
use Twitter for the use case that RSS serves than use RSS for that purpose.

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akkartik
I disagree. I think more people get their news from Twitter by following
people they want to receive news from. What's more, the number of such people
grows everyday, far faster than for RSS.

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evanw
The Follow button uses Twitter's "web intents" that have been available for a
while now (<http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents>).

You can also use web intents to do things like compose, reply, retweet, or
favorite a tweet.

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mrkurt
It'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.

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ivankirigin
Weird that they have an option to choose a language rather than just detecting
the language of the browser and automatically translating the button.

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jedschmidt
I 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.

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aristidb
Also, different button sizes can destroy layouts. Consider Facebook: "Like" in
German becomes "Gefällt mir"...

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startupcto
It'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".

