San Francisco — Tech news site Mashable.com has unmasked confidential documents late Tuesday, which states that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter is gearing up to introduce an official “Tweet Button” that will let users share content from the web, and counting how many times a post has been tweeted, the concept is similar to the “Recommend” button from Facebook that is visible pretty much everywhere online. The button could hit as soon as Thursday, August 12.
Although details are pretty scant, but the new “Tweet Button” has the powers to disrupt several companies within the Twitter micro-economy, and strain already-frayed relationships with some third-party Twitter developers.
So far, services like Tweetmeme and Retweet.com have offered their own take on retweet buttons. But with this untoward development, both are likely to be most strongly affected by the new release, given that their product is essentially the same.
Unearth documents show Twitter’s secret plans to release an official Twitter button, potential competition with Facebook’s wildly popular Recommend button. (Mashable.com)
Mashable and others have pondered that a deal could be in the works. As of 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the TweetMeme was briefly unavailable due to “failed networking equipment,” only adding to the mystery and perhaps indicating that official announcements by both Twitter and TweetMeme could be coming today.
That said, according to details secured by Mashable, the service is proposed to go live as early as 12 August, with the code to incorporate the button already available — although it only works for a select few test accounts.
Just select the Tweet button and you can seamlessly share a link to the story with your friends and followers on Twitter.
“It should be tomorrow, that is what I have been told,” Ben Parr, co-editor of Mashable.com, said in a statement.
And because the service would be linked directly to Twitter’s servers, it would be more precise than other third-party services with similar functionality — and should drive traffic back to the original site, the documents claim.
“The Tweet Button will place your content in front of more interested users, driving traffic back to your site,” the documents state.
The button will be a simple line of code that can be incorporated in to any site. The official Tweet Button will come in three sizes — 10 x 20 pixels, 55 x 20 pixels, 55 x 63 pixels — with five different customization options and features the Twitter bird alongside the word “Tweet” and a counter of how many times the button has been clicked.
From a developer’s perspective, the button appears to be as easy to install as the @anywhere API, likely leading to rapid adoption of the new button upon it’s official release.
“We are still unearthing 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,” Parr said.
Also interesting to note within the leaked papers is news that the official Tweet Button will use Twitter’s own URL shortener, the highly coveted t.co, the shortest possible domain (equal to NPR’s n.pr). This could spell trouble for third-party URL shortener’s such as bit.ly and TinyURL, and could lead to significant changes with the way URLs are displayed in third-party Twitter clients as well as the Twitter.com website.
Both Twitter and TweetMeme declined to comment on the rumors.