Friday, August 27, 2010

Twitter Tuesday - the official Tweet Button arrives, Twifficiency explained, and more

Filed under: Features, Social Software, Microblogging, Twitter
There's been plenty of big news from the Twitter camp in the past week, so let's jump right in and start with Twitter's official announcements, including the new Tweet Button!

The first thing everybody thought when Twitter announced an official sharing button was "Uh, but what about TweetMeme?" The popular tweet sharing site -- it's like a Digg based on retweets! -- is just the latest third-party service to get some competition from Twitter itself, but Tweetmeme is a different case than the clients and ad networks which met with a similar fate earlier this year.

See, TweetMeme realized that they likely wouldn't survive by competing with Twitter's Tweet Button, so they made a deal to help launch it. The terms of the arrangement are unclear, but the Tweet Button will certainly benefit from TweetMeme's expertise. Twitter will also get the benefit of TweetMeme's userbase, because TweetMeme will now be pointing to the Tweet Button.

Check out Twitter's Tweet Button video, plus more Twitter news, after the jump.



Here's Twitter's official video explaining the Tweet Button:



and now, on to the rest of the stories!


The other major feature launch on Twitter this week was the "Followed By" and "You Both Follow" info that now shows up on every Twitter profile page when you're logged in. Now, when a stranger follows you, you can probably figure out where they came from by looking at who you have in common. Both of these features are more useful than the annoying new recommendations about who to follow, which I would file in the same category as Facebook's irksome recommendations.


What in blazes is Twifficiency? It's the newest in a long line of Twitter scores that you can only get by automatically tweeting it to all of your followers. You've probably seen it going around today, but is it worth spamming for? Probably not.

It's just a little project by a 17-year-old Scottish developer who wanted to learn how oAuth works, and initially forgot to include a warning that his app would auto-tweet your score. He's since apologized, but not before Twifficiency became a big viral hit. Verdict: it's not a scam, but it also doesn't tell you anything useful. It would be cooler if there were some transparency about what the score means (if anything.)


If you don't want to run a desktop Twitter app, but you'd like to tweet from your browser without keeping Twitter.com open in a separate tab, Ostrich might be for you. This gorgeous little Twitter client for Safari (I know, I wish it supported other browsers, too) drops right down onto any Web page and gives you full access to your unread tweets, mentions and more, and also allows you to send tweets and quickly share a link to the page you're on. Did I mention it looks really nice?

Well, that's the Twitter scoop for this week. Keep coming back to Download Squad on Tuesdays for my take on what's new in the Twitterverse. Catch you later!
Twitter Tuesday - the official Tweet Button arrives, Twifficiency explained, and more originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

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