Bye TweetMeMe, Hello Twitter Buttons
Twitter have launched their own buttons for anyone to stick on their web site, blog etc and it looks set to replace the, up until now standard for Twitter sharing, TweetMeMe.
At first it seemed as though Twitter were steaming into the playground to give TweetMeMe a monumental wedgie. However, now the news has been shared officially by Twitter (on their blog) that they’ve been working closely with the nice folks at TweetMeMe and “from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button.”
Going on this then, it would appear that TweetMeMe is going to continue on “business as usual”. Initially I would expect a drop in the use of TweetMeMe’s buttons as people want to use the “newest, hippest thing” but time will tell on that one.
I’ve started to use it on this blog, not because it’s “new” and/or “hip” but because I like the style, its ease in setting up and the customisable extras. Let’s take a look:
1. Hop over to the Twitter button page: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton
2. Choose your button style and, if you want, customize it. You get a choice of vertical count, horizontal count or none.
If you like you can go through the other tabs in this section to customise your button further. Under Tweet text you can leave it set to the title of the page the button is on or add your own. Next is URL where you can have it set to link to the page the button is on or you can put a set URL in such as the homepage to your blog. Lastly you can specify a language.
3. Next is a really handy (optional) feature where you can recommend other Twitter users as well as your own. This would be really useful if, say for example, you run a blog with someone else, you could include their Twitter profile as well.
4. Last step is to have a quick preview of how your button will look and then grab the generated code for you to paste into your HTML.
That’s it. Paste the code into your HTML and hey presto, a shiny new Twitter button for your content to be shared with the world.
If you want to dive into the backend and customise some more, you can check out Twitter’s Sharing API and use it to build your own button: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet_button
One last thing, please share this using the Twitter button below :)
