Developers and publishers who have adopted Twitter’s Tweet Button say the tool is beneficial in letting their site readers and application users conveniently share links on Twitter, but that some features can be improved, including its analytics data and mobile functionality.
The Tweet Button, launched almost seven months ago, is designed to be easy for developers and publishers to embed on their sites and applications so that their users can easily share and “retweet” links on Twitter right from their site and application interfaces.
“Twitter has done a great job with the button. They have given non-technical people an easy way to add tweet buttons to their page through a form, as well as giving developers means to extend and manipulate the button for more complex scenarios, along with providing developers with good documentation,” said Peter Denton, co-founder and product marketing director at Mombo.com, a site that analyzes Twitter posts about movies and calculates an aggregate rating for each film.
“It would be great to have more information on the usage of the Tweet Button on the sites I manage, with the option of aggregating data on a site level as well as seeing data for each shared item,” Lavin said via e-mail.
It’s one area where the Tweet Button falls short of its predecessor, TweetMeme’s Retweet Button, which offered more analytics data and more flexibility in using third-party URL shorteners, Denton said. TweetMeme and Twitter agreed to collaborate to gradually replace the Retweet Button with the Tweet Button across the Web.
“The more analytics data that Twitter surfaces to me natively, the better I can make my product around their network,” Denton said.
“Currently, the Tweet Button doesn’t really offer anything except display the count of the number of times a URL has been shared on Twitter,” Shetty said.
“When it is used to share a tweet, it will take the user to a non-mobile-friendly page in Twitter so users have to zoom in to get a better view of the page,” Kieran said.
Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment about the Tweet Button.