It’s not as if Twitter actually required more improvements, seeing how popular it has become nowadays, for the casual user and the user hunting the latest news, like me. Still, the company behind it is constantly bringing new features for Twitter. On Thursday the little blue bird introduced a new feature, dubbed the ‘Tweet Button’ which will allow its users to link to content on external sites with a single click. Say you’re on a site, and you discover some pretty exciting information you’d love to share with friends (a funny clip or maybe a revolutionary cooking recipe). You can now avoid the inconvenient, old-fashioned way of copy-pasting the link and simply use the Tweet button to automatically inform all your friends on Twitter.
This new feature makes a lot of sense. Twitter is all about finding interesting stuff on the Internet and sharing it with other people, as the most recent Twitter blog post suggests. The company has also discovered that nearly a quarter of all Tweets include a link. Copy pasting, link shortening and bouncing between browser tabs has been working so far, but as Twitter puts it, it’s sometimes “too much work”. To avoid all that the Tweet Button makes everything simple. You’ll just get a Tweet box as soon as you hit the button which will include a shortened link that points to the info you want to share.
Also, after posting something to Twitter via the Tweet Button, you’ll also get to see suggestions for accounts to follow. The accounts will be suggested by the website you’ve just visited and could include the reporter of the article you just shared, for example. Apparently, the new Tweet Button isn’t just for your regular Tweeter. Publishers may also fancy it. “The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too,” the post on Twitter’s blog mentions. “Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites. It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following.”
Other sites have thought of this long before Twitter, it seems. The company has discovered similar buttons on various blogs or news sites that allow the sharing of content on Twitter, but now everyone can simply switch to this new ‘standard’, the Tweet Button. A large number of sites have started using the Tweet Button. They include: Ask.com, CBS Interactive, CNN, eHow.com, Hulu, The Onion, Time.com, TV Guide, USA Today, WordPress and YouTube among others. As people start to find this convenient, more sites will most start adding the button. Those who want to add a Tweet Button to their webpage can simply go here to get the coding needed.
That’s not all that Twitter has been up to lately. Recently the company has also announced that people interested in following someone through twitter, who don’t have an account set up for the site, may do so with the help of their mobile phones. The same users will also be able to tweet by sending text messages and even sign up to the service on their handsets. With this, Twitter is somehow going back to the basics. When Twitter started out it was strictly based on tweeting through text messaging, which is why the Tweets today are still limited to 140 characters (text messages are limited at 160 characters).
