Twitter's new "official" tweet button

[AdamG]

Any word on whether the new tweet button will allow custom link
integration? If so, anyone cooking up a solution to how to make this
happen?

Thanks!

--Adam

[Matthew Palmer]

That would be awesome!

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Matthew Jacob Herbert Palmer
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[Marc Boucher]

Not going to happen. It's part of their business model. They collect the data from their URL shortener and use that to help generate revenue from whatever product they are pushing.

Marc

[Matthew Palmer]

Marc - Found this on Mashable, looks like it came from Twitter. Not 100% sure what it means, but seems to imply that this may not be so mutually exclusive with their business model after all?

 

"Some clients including Twitter.com may begin displaying the original URL, or the destination URL, but clicks will pass through the original URL as expected (including through any shortener you may already use)."

[Marc Boucher]

If that's the case then they would need to provide some API code that allows you to setup your URL shortener as or before the user clicks on the button. That would be good and welcome by me. 

Marc

[L Voss]

Hi folks -

We have met with Twitter about their new tweet button functionality,
and have some promising information from them about how best to
integrate awe.sm functionality. We are currently working on
complementary functionality at our end, which we hope to announce in
detail soon.

The good news is that, fundamentally speaking, the kind of integration
you're discussing will be possible, it's just a matter of coming up
with the most efficient implementation on our side.

Laurie (@seldo)

On Aug 13, 5:26 pm, Marc Boucher <marc.bouc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If that's the case then they would need to provide some API code that allows
> you to setup your URL shortener as or before the user clicks on the button.
> That would be good and welcome by me.
>
> Marc
>
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Matthew Palmer

> <matthewjhpal...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> > Marc - Found this on Mashable, looks like it came from Twitter. Not 100%
> > sure what it means, but seems to imply that this may not be so mutually
> > exclusive with their business model after all?
>
> >> "Some clients including Twitter.com may begin displaying the original URL,
> >> or the destination URL, but clicks will pass through the original URL as
> >> expected (including through any shortener you may already use)."
>

> > On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Marc Boucher <marc.bouc...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> Not going to happen. It's part of their business model. They collect the
> >> data from their URL shortener and use that to help generate revenue from
> >> whatever product they are pushing.
>
> >> Marc
>

> >> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 8:00 PM, AdamG <agel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> Any word on whether the new tweet button will allow custom link
> >>> integration? If so, anyone cooking up a solution to how to make this
> >>> happen?
>
> >>> Thanks!
>
> >>> --Adam
>
> >>> --
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> >>> .

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>
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>
> > --
> > Matthew Jacob Herbert Palmer
> > 323-906-7712
>
> > --
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> > .

[Jonathan Strauss]

I will relay more details of the solution on which we're working and address some of your specific questions shortly.

-jonathan

(Sorry for the delay, it's moving day for us - http://flic.kr/p/8s6oyq)

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to awesm-api+...@googlegroups.com.

[Jonathan Strauss]

Hey guys, here's the full scoop in detail.

As you can imagine, integration with Twitter's new tweet button is a top priority for us. We're fortunate to have a very good relationship with Twitter and I had a meeting earlier today with the team responsible for their tweet button.

There's good news and bad news, but no simple solution. So, I'll just lay everything out below:

A) Twitter started wrapping all links in t.co in their API several months back (see http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-shouldnt.html) and adding a 'display link' field to the API. What this means is that the user-experience should not change (i.e. the tweet is displayed in Twitter.com or any clients with whatever link is submitted), however *all* links clicked on Twitter (their site and 3rd-party clients) will redirect through t.co before hitting the URL submitted. So, awe.sm (or any other redirect tracker) will still record clicks, Twitter is just recording them as well.

B) The link displayed in the compose window for the new official tweet button will *always* be a t.co link, regardless of what link you submit to the button. However, the link submitted to the button is what will be used as the display link and what will be wrapped by t.co. So, the resulting tweets will not show t.co.

C) There is an undocumented parameter in the new tweet button for a 'count url' (see http://blog.bit.ly/post/945591208/using-bit-ly-with-twitters-tweet-button). This means you can tell the button to display the count for one URL (e.g. the canonical URL of the page in question) and use a different URL (e.g. your redirect tracking link) in the tweet it generates.

D) Twitter does *not* plan to support any 3rd-party encoding of links natively in the tweet button anytime soon. So, all 3rd-party redirect trackers/URL shorteners will have to work via C) above.

So, C) above is good news for us but D) is bad news. C) means it is relatively easy for you to use links from your awe.sm-powered domain with the tweet button, but D) means it is going to be much harder to give you the same kind of granular analytics you can get with an awe.sm-integrated tool like the BackType Tweetcount button (http://www.backtype.com/widgets/tweetcount). This is because awe.sm works differently from conventional URL shorteners, like bit.ly and others, who generate a single shortened URL for a given original (long) URL. awe.sm's tracking advantage comes from generating a unique tracking link *per tweet* so you can better understand how different actions drive traffic.

In the very short-term (like hopefully next week), we plan to offer you a version of the official tweet button that will support what is effectively a static link on your awe.sm-powered domain per original URL. This means your branded links will be displayed, but your analytics from the official tweet button will not match with ones from other tools (you'll still have accurate overall total click counts, but you won't have accurate clicks per share because it will only be one share).

In the following weeks, our top priority will be delivering a solution that also gives you proper awe.sm tracking with the tweet button. We are committed to our approach of a unique awe.sm link for each share action and already have an idea of how to do it within the constraints of the official tweet button.

We will be delivering these solutions as a javascript widget and a WordPress Plugin. And we will do it in a way that if you install the temporary short-term solution, you will automatically get (or in the case of the WordPress Plugin get notified of) the upgrade to the full solution when it's available. If anyone in the group would like to adapt these into a plugin for another platform, we'd love to help.

We really appreciate your support and we're fully committed to delivering you guys the most advanced sharing analytics available.

Best,
-jonathan

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

[Jonathan Strauss [Staff]]

Here's a WordPress plugin that should work with your awe.sm-powered
domain, however please see the caveat at the bottom of the post about
stats:
http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2010/08/15/tweet-button-with-shortening-for-wordpress/

We are tagging these links with channel=twitter, tool=tweet-button,
and campaign=static, so you can sort them from your other links in
stats.

This was a pretty quickly hacked together plugin. So, please let me
know if you find any issues.

We are continuing to work on the long-term solution (i.e. a unique
awe.sm link for each tweet), and will let you know when we have
something to test.

Best,
-jonathan

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

On Aug 13, 9:01 pm, Jonathan Strauss <jonat...@snowballfactory.com>
wrote:

> Hey guys, here's the full scoop in detail.
>
> As you can imagine, integration with Twitter's new tweet button is a top priority for us. We're fortunate to have a very good relationship with Twitter and I had a meeting earlier today with the team responsible for their tweet button.
>
> There's good news and bad news, but no simple solution. So, I'll just lay everything out below:
>

> A) Twitter started wrapping all links in t.co in their API several months back (seehttp://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/links-and-twitter-length-shouldnt.html) and adding a 'display link' field to the API. What this means is that the user-experience should not change (i.e. the tweet is displayed in Twitter.com or any clients with whatever link is submitted), however *all* links clicked on Twitter (their site and 3rd-party clients) will redirect through t.co before hitting the URL submitted. So, awe.sm (or any other redirect tracker) will still record clicks, Twitter is just recording them as well.

>
> B) The link displayed in the compose window for the new official tweet button will *always* be a t.co link, regardless of what link you submit to the button. However, the link submitted to the button is what will be used as the display link and what will be wrapped by t.co. So, the resulting tweets will not show t.co.
>

> C) There is an undocumented parameter in the new tweet button for a 'count url' (seehttp://blog.bit.ly/post/945591208/using-bit-ly-with-twitters-tweet-bu...). This means you can tell the button to display the count for one URL (e.g. the canonical URL of the page in question) and use a different URL (e.g. your redirect tracking link) in the tweet it generates.

>
> D) Twitter does *not* plan to support any 3rd-party encoding of links natively in the tweet button anytime soon. So, all 3rd-party redirect trackers/URL shorteners will have to work via C) above.
>
> So, C) above is good news for us but D) is bad news. C) means it is relatively easy for you to use links from your awe.sm-powered domain with the tweet button, but D) means it is going to be much harder to give you the same kind of granular analytics you can get with an awe.sm-integrated tool like the BackType Tweetcount button (http://www.backtype.com/widgets/tweetcount). This is because awe.sm works differently from conventional URL shorteners, like bit.ly and others, who generate a single shortened URL for a given original (long) URL. awe.sm's tracking advantage comes from generating a unique tracking link *per tweet* so you can better understand how different actions drive traffic.
>
> In the very short-term (like hopefully next week), we plan to offer you a version of the official tweet button that will support what is effectively a static link on your awe.sm-powered domain per original URL. This means your branded links will be displayed, but your analytics from the official tweet button will not match with ones from other tools (you'll still have accurate overall total click counts, but you won't have accurate clicks per share because it will only be one share).
>
> In the following weeks, our top priority will be delivering a solution that also gives you proper awe.sm tracking with the tweet button. We are committed to our approach of a unique awe.sm link for each share action and already have an idea of how to do it within the constraints of the official tweet button.
>
> We will be delivering these solutions as a javascript widget and a WordPress Plugin. And we will do it in a way that if you install the temporary short-term solution, you will automatically get (or in the case of the WordPress Plugin get notified of) the upgrade to the full solution when it's available. If anyone in the group would like to adapt these into a plugin for another platform, we'd love to help.
>
> We really appreciate your support and we're fully committed to delivering you guys the most advanced sharing analytics available.
>
> Best,
> -jonathan
>
> --

> Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founderhttp://snowballfactory.com
>
> Campaign tracking for social media -http://awe.sm
> A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter -http://tweetpo.st
> Sharecount button for Facebook -http://www.fbshare.me

>
> On Aug 13, 2010, at 6:40 PM, Jonathan Strauss wrote:
>
>
>
> > I will relay more details of the solution on which we're working and address some of your specific questions shortly.
>
> > -jonathan
>

> > (Sorry for the delay, it's moving day for us -http://flic.kr/p/8s6oyq)

>
> > --
> > Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
> >http://snowballfactory.com
>

> > Campaign tracking for social media -http://awe.sm
> > A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter -http://tweetpo.st
> > Sharecount button for Facebook -http://www.fbshare.me

[iPhoneclub.nl]

Thanks Jonathan. The plugin is excellent! Your turnaround has been
really impressive, considering the challenges with Twitter's own t.co
shortener.

I have a few questions/feature requests for 1.1. Hope they could be
added:
- For the ':Author of the post' part: please make this translatable
(through the option screen is fine with me, through gettext would be
too cumbersome) (line 255)
- For the recommended user (author of the post); could you please
allow us to enter more Twitter usernames here, after the main account
and post author? I believe the maximum is 6, separated with semi
colons (see this discussion;
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/6e1571d1c2ad49aa/8b98841ce14d6429?lnk=gst&q=recommend#8b98841ce14d6429).
Reasoning behind this is I want to recommend our other blog titles as
well (e.g. if posting from @iPadNL I want to recommend @iPhoneclub)
- I would love to have a prepend text option, e.g. 'New blog post:
' (configurable) (see: http://twitter.com/iPadNL/status/21343804845)
- I would love to have an append hash tag option, e.g. #ipad #apple
(configurable) (see: http://twitter.com/iPadNL/status/21343804845)

Other than that, kudos to you and the team!

[iPhoneclub.nl]

Is it correct Twitter isn't showing any results when clicking the
count button? Is this because the search is for the awe.sm domain
instead of Twitter's own t.co domain:
http://www.ipadplanet.nl/8950/pas-op-voor-onverwachte-roamingkosten-op-je-ipad/
-> http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftblt.nl%2F5SR

[Jonathan Strauss]

I noticed this issue as well and have posted on http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/ed8bf9ded82fd5ca.

From my limited testing, it has nothing to do with the URL being specified for sharing (which is for some reasons being used for the search query, the search query should be using the data-counturl value IMHO). You can change the data-counturl parameter to that of another blog post with a tweet count (e.g. http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/tctv-fight-crowdsourcing-movies-will-cause-americas-creative-collapse/) and it will show you that count while still tweeting the same specified awe.sm-powered link.

My working theory is that Twitter isn't looking through awe.sm-powered URLs for the tweet counts. We went through this with both Tweetmeme and BackType early on and I'm sure should be a relatively easy fix on Twitter's side. However, it wouldn't hurt for other folks to chime in on the above thread.

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

[Jonathan Strauss]

Great suggestions Jean-Paul!

Version 0.3 is now live at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-button-with-shortening/ with the following changes:
* Added support for tweet button localization (English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese)
* You can now customize the description of the author in the recommended users list (primarily for localization, default is still "Author of the post")
* You can now add a comma separated list of additional Twitter users to recommend (the button will accept up to 6 total and only show 2 at a time)
* Fixed a bug that prevented you from disabling the option to recommend the post author

With regard to the default text of the tweet, Twitter constructs it as such:
<Text specified> <URL specified> via @<via username specified>

So, the only thing you can edit is the text that appears before the link, which is currently the blog post title. I agree that this should be configurable in the future. However, making it configurable means supporting wildcards (like %title% and maybe %tags%) that would change automatically on a per post basis. This is a bit more involved than the above changes (and I haven't fully figured out the desired behavior yet), so I'll probably tackle it over the weekend.

Your feedback is very helpful. So, please keep it coming!

Thanks,
-jonathan

P.S. I have been in communication with the Twitter team about the awe.sm-powered URL counting (or lack thereof) and they told me they're looking into it. I will pass on whatever news I have as soon as I hear more from them.

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

[Marc Boucher]

BTW for those who use Movable Type I'm updating my plugin TweetType to work OAuth and hopefully the awe.sm API.

Marc Boucher

[Jonathan Strauss]

Hey Marc,

Please contact me directly at devel...@awe.sm and I'd be happy to help you with the awe.sm integration for your plugin. We will be releasing new v2 Create APIs very shortly (email coming on that soon), so it may make more sense to do the integration against those. And when the integration is done, we'd be very happy to feature your plugin in http://create.awe.sm/tools/.

Best,

-jonathan

-- 

Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder

http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm

A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st

Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

[iPhoneclub.nl]

> Your feedback is very helpful. So, please keep it coming!

Thanks Jonathan. Excellent update again. Very happy with the button
and the added functionality (and with awe.sm in general of course!).
You guys certainly live up to your brand :D

> P.S. I have been in communication with the Twitter team about the awe.sm-powered URL counting (or lack thereof) and they told me they're looking into it. I will pass on whatever news I have as soon as I hear more from them.

Funny enough this seems to work a lot better for us now. Count is
correct and it even picked up all previous tweeted articles (with
custom domain). Knock knock though, you never know with Twitter.

Kind regards,
Jean-Paul Horn,
iPhoneclub (http://www.iphoneclub.nl)

[iPhoneclub.nl]

> Funny enough this seems to work a lot better for us now. Count is
> correct and it even picked up all previous tweeted articles (with
> custom domain). Knock knock though, you never know with Twitter.

Sorry, I spoke too soon. The count is correctly displayed (which is
most important of course), but the search (by clicking on the counter)
still yields zero results.

[iPhoneclub.nl]

> With regard to the default text of the tweet, Twitter constructs it as such:
> <Text specified> <URL specified> via @<via username specified>
>
> So, the only thing you can edit is the text that appears before the link, which is currently the blog post title. I agree that this should be configurable in the future. However, making it configurable means supporting wildcards (like %title% and maybe %tags%) that would change automatically on a per post basis. This is a bit more involved than the above changes (and I haven't fully figured out the desired behavior yet), so I'll probably tackle it over the weekend.

Sorry for the stream of posts. Google Groups doesn't let you edit your
messages (or I'm overlooking this feature)

What I meant was something like this:
<custom prepend (configurable)> <twitter message, which is blog post
title + url via @<via username specified> <custom append>

Or have I misunderstood and doesn't Twitter allow us to customize the
('automated') tweet? Anyway: you wouldn't need %title% since that's
already part of the tweet. %tags% might be a nice idea for the hash
tags though.

Essentially I want this:
iPhoneclub.nl: (<title> <url> via @iPhoneclub) #iphone

The part between the brackets is the current Twitter message.

[Jonathan Strauss]

The tweet button takes 3 arguments that make up the pre-populated tweet:
* data-text
* data-url
* data-via

The construction of the pre-populated tweet is as follows:
<data-text><data-url> via @<data-via>

Specifically, you cannot append anything *after* the URL or via and you can only give one argument for what comes before them.

So, if we are going to make the data-text value configurable, it will need to include the post title as an option if the blog owner wants to include that every time. What you could do would be:
data-text="<custom prepend><post title><custom append>"

However, that would all go *before* the URL in the pre-populated tweet.

--
Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founder
http://snowballfactory.com

Campaign tracking for social media - http://awe.sm
A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter - http://tweetpo.st
Sharecount button for Facebook - http://www.fbshare.me

[iPhoneclub.nl]

Thanks for the explanation Jonathan! I wasn't aware of that
"restriction". The prepend option could indeed still be done, but
agreed: you would need to define %title% as well and also adds some
additional math to make sure the tweet stays under 140 chars. It's
probably not worth it just for the Twitter button. Now I'm thinking
more about it, it makes more sense for the initial publish tweet (like
with Twitter Publisher: 'New blog post') than for just the retweet
button. However, I might just hack the custom prepend into data-text
for myself for better branding and more visibility of our blog domain.
Need to think this over more :)

-JP


On 19 aug, 02:04, Jonathan Strauss <jonat...@snowballfactory.com>
wrote:

> The tweet button takes 3 arguments that make up the pre-populated tweet:
> * data-text
> * data-url
> * data-via
>
> The construction of the pre-populated tweet is as follows:
> <data-text><data-url> via @<data-via>
>
> Specifically, you cannot append anything *after* the URL or via and you can only give one argument for what comes before them.
>
> So, if we are going to make the data-text value configurable, it will need to include the post title as an option if the blog owner wants to include that every time. What you could do would be:
> data-text="<custom prepend><post title><custom append>"
>
> However, that would all go *before* the URL in the pre-populated tweet.
>
> --

> Jonathan Strauss, Co-Founderhttp://snowballfactory.com
>
> Campaign tracking for social media -http://awe.sm
> A smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter -http://tweetpo.st
> Sharecount button for Facebook -http://www.fbshare.me

[Mark Carey]

Hi Marc,

I also have a soon-to-released Twitter plugin for MT that includes
support for awe.sm. Actually I created a WWW::Shorten module for
awe.sm that I probably should submit to cpan, but I've never submitted
anything to cpan before ;) Let me know if that might be useful or if
you have any other questions...

Jonathan, thanks for the heads up on the v2 APIs, will need to look at
those when they are out....

Cheers,

Mark

[Marc Boucher]

Hi Mark,

Since I've yet to start on the awe.sm side of my plug-in I would welcome your perl module. I'll integrate into my app if I can. Does your module allow for someone to chose a different URL shortening service?

We'll have to compare apps at some point. I'm going to post mine to GitHub as soon as the next release is ready.

Thanks

Marc

[Jonathan Strauss [Staff]]

Hey everyone,

I've just posted the (un-styled) documentation for a brand-new awe.sm-
powered Tweet Button at http://tools.awe.sm/tweet-button/.

It works exactly like the official Tweet Button, but allows you to
natively specify your awe.sm API Key and will create a unique awe.sm-
powered tracking link for each tweet (will also build parent-child
relationships between tweets).

You can embed it 3 ways:

1) Using javascript:
<script src="http://tools.awe.sm/tweet-button/files/widgets.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-
awesm-key="YOUR API KEY">Tweet</a>

2) Using an iframe:
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"
src="http://tools.awe.sm/tweet-button/files/tweet_button.html?
awesmapikey=YOUR API KEY"
style="width:130px; height:50px;"></iframe>

3) Using the WordPress Plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-button-with-shortening/ has
been updated to support the new method

Enjoy! And please let us know if you have any questions or issues.

Best,
-jonathan

[Mark Carey]

Marc,

Sorry for the delayed reply...

The plugin has now been released at:

http://mt-hacks.com/twittertools.html

Inside the /extlib/ directory is the WWW::Shorten module (not authored
by me). I did create the WWW::Shorten::Awesm module. You can also
see the other services supported, and you might find additional
WWW::Shorten modules out there in the wild as well...

-Mark