Twitter released their Tweet Button today, which I’ve been able to integrate into my site in no time flat. One JavaScript include, and a single anchor, and away it goes. It is dead simple to add in a custom title, URL, and @username, which utilizes the relatively new HTML5 data attributes.. and it’s up in a breeze.
On the technical side, this is a huge step up. Many sites are non-trivial, requiring a number of steps, and, more importantly, some reasonably obscure structures. The tweet button also looks very nice: subtle, and entirely functional.
Twitter’s scope
The first competitor that comes to mind is Digg; yes, Facebook is also in the mix with its Like count, though the Digg count has been around for years now, and was, in my mind, the starter of the second run of website counters. Furthermore, Digg launched its own shortening service more than a year ago; and as of today we now have t.co, Twitter’s crazy short domain name.
I’m not sure where Digg is headed, though they seem to be having a lot of trouble this past year. I’m currently in the alpha, and I can’t say it either gets me excited or gets me to visit the page any more than I had. I do hope they can pull it together, though with Tweets superseding Diggs, the future seems to be headed for the.. bird.
Then there’s Facebook, which has had its Like Button for months now. Realistically, the Tweet Button is more in conversation with this particular element, albeit with JavaScript and HTML5 rather than a single URL with GET variables. I’ve gotten less fond of Facebook by the year, and that Twitter is now again taking over this realm I’m much happier to teh bookface.
Future reach
This particular story is about aggregation, and about integration. To me, the next step seems to be going back towards Digg: having some function whereby a URL can be prepended by t.co, for instance, which would start a Tweet with the appropriate URL link and title.
More importantly, being able to share content from mobile devices has to get easier, one way or another. These systems tend towards that, though still depend on the particular site to implement the button. Blogger had a “Blog this” toolbar button, and it seems we’ve forgotten this type of functionality in the mobile space. There must be some web-standard way, too, which does not depend on a platform-dependent app/toolbar/addon/etc. It’s rather meaningless without widespread adoption, which is why it’s more sensible to have this in the hands of an established community with a large userbase.. though I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see where this all leads.