TweetMeme and Topsy Make Room For Official Tweet Button

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Will The New Official Tweet Button By Twitter Displace Our Favorites?

Many bloggers today are keenly familiar with the fairly infamous Tweetmeme button. It is the little green twitter share button that makes sharing our content to twitter pretty straight forward. Tweetmeme originally had some strong competition from Retweet who has now fallen by the wayside.

TweetMeme

Tweetmeme connects to a visitors twitter account via OAuth and allows them to get a small javascript popup tweet box over the site rather than being opened in a complete new tab/window. The OAuth connection can be a deterent to new twitter users but for the most part twitter members are growing comfortable with it’s security.

If like me you wondered how come TechCrunch gets a personally branded popup box, its because Tweetmeme also sells pro services that allow branding, starting at $1,000/yr. Tweetmeme makes it easy to embed the tweetmeme button in your site, emails, rss feeds.

Topsy

Recently, Topsy’s share button has been getting a lot of favorable press as they provide a new way to keep track of long term popularity on twitter. Instead of flushing out data after a short time, topsy keeps its data long term and by balancing the sheer numbers (which can be gamed) with number of tweets from key influences, it brings to the table a viable way to view current popular links. This does for links what “trending topics” does for ideas on twitter and is a powerful way to find out what’s hot in the twittersphere!

While available in many forms, probably the most common is Topsy’s blue theme, compact layout. As is the case with this example you can also see a modifier when a post gains popularity. Below you can also see some examples of their other theming abilities that give you lots of design flexibility. For example, want to see the top 100 links at the moment? How about the top 100 tweets at the moment? Because of the quality job they do at filtering out spam and focusing on influencers it does a nice job of providing a real idea of whats trending as far as news goes.

Functionally, the Topsy button does not require the visitor to do pass-through authentication and does not instill a sense of fear that their credentials may be stolen. Instead, clicking the button auto-opens a new tab/window with the visitors twitter account (which they may need to log into) and then fills in the tweet contents into the status message box, allowing them to quickly edit it and hit send. Many site owners shy away from this button because it DOES take visitors away from their page.

Where Tweetmeme limits the number of times a tweet may be sent by a unique visitor (complaining if you try to send it more than once), the Topsy button keeps no such count and allows for easy re-sharing.

Topsy support was recently integrated into the Digg Digg plugin which makes my Top 10 Must Have WordPress Plugins list!

Welcome Twitters Official Tweet Button To The Party!

Yesterday, Mashable.com revealed a confidential document it had stumbled upon that indicated that Twitter is about to join the party with their own official tweet button.

“We’re still diving into the details, but from what we can tell, the Tweet Button is designed to be the most comprehensive counter of retweets and shares across Twitter’s network,” Ben Parr, co-editor of Mashable.com, told FoxNews.com yesterday.

(Images courtesy of Mashable.com)

Functionally, its similar to both Tweetmeme and Topsy in that it opens a small popup window but does not using OAuth and actually loading the visitor’s twitter account directly in the small window. While not nearly as visually “clean” as Tweetmeme this is probably the best blend of both solutions. Reading through the leaked code, I was unable to find any indication that the button could be easilystyled in anything other than Twitter’s default baby blues.

Until the buttons are officially live they only work for a select number of beta testers, but they are expected to go live today (Thursday) and we shall soon be seeing them all over the web!

As soon as they are live we will probably begin seeing an influx of wordpress plugins to allow for easy integration and it is very likely that within a few weeks Digg Digg will be updated to make adding this new button easy.

Thoughts

I was initially pretty annoyed at this arrival as Twitter has a bad habit of abusing its developers by intentionally competing. Their tendency to abuse their developer base has soured many people on developing for them.

However, the longer I looked into these the more I am inspired that the blend of accuracy, tracking, name recognition and tweet method is likely to win the hearts of the community at large. Whether they will own the space as tweetmeme currently does, remains to be seen but is likely.

It’s also worth noting that this also begins the first major push for twitter’s new shortener t.co which it plans to wrap all of the URLs in. There’s a lot of talk about this action as it will affect all of twitter.com, not just their buttons. More information on t.co can be found here.

So what do you think? Tweetmeme? Topsy? Tweet Button? What’s your flavor?

Excited about the new button? Love it? Hate it? Let me know your thoughts below and check out my buttons above for sharing the post if you found it useful!

Kimberly

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