Testing out the new Twitter Tweet Button

New Tweet Button Image

I'm testing out the new Twitter tweet button. The folks at twitter introduced the new tweet button on their blog: Pushing Our (Tweet) Button:

Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear -- pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.

Here's how to make a new twitter tweet button for your site. When you click that link, you'll be taken to twitter and a page that generates code for you to place on your site.

Here are my results.

Here's what it looks like on a blog post:

Twitter Tweet Button

When you click it, it opens up a window with a tweet ready to go. You have a chance to edit it if you like.

Here's what the tweet pop up window looks like for the previous post on this blog.

Twitter Tweet Pop Up Window

Twitter automatically shortens the permalink to the blog post with twitter's own link shortener.

Click the "Tweet" button and you are sent to twitter.

The resulting tweet looks like this on twitter:

It's interesting that even though the URL was shortened in the pop up window, on the twitter website, the URL is displayed as expanded, BUT not expanded completely. That's a problem.

Twitter Breaks Links
When you hover over the displayed URL, offonatangent.blogspot.com/2010/08/jamaic…, you can see in your browser display bar, the shortened link, http://t.co/xwxqKra. I've duplicated this appearance here.

This will break though, when someone does not use the twitter RT function, and copies pastes the URL into a new tweet.

They'll then get something like this, offonatangent.blogspot.com/2010/08/jamaic…, which is broken.

Get ready to see a lot of broken links on RT's made by hand with copy and paste.

Here's what it looks like when I use the Embed Tweet bookmarklet to share it:

Testing out the new Twitter RT button. Off On A Tangent: Jamaica Pond Panorama from AutoStitch http://t.co/xwxqKra via @stevegarfieldThu Aug 12 15:49:43 via Tweet ButtonSteve Garfield
stevegarfield

Here's how it is displayed on the Mac twitter desktop app, Tweetie:

Tweet displayed with shortened URL.

Recommend People
There's a recommend people to follow feature that should be working, but I don't see it.  Do you?

Try it out and click the Tweet button below. :-)

Update:
Wordpress.com Twitter Tweet button.

Easy Set Up: Appearance/Extras/Show twitter "Tweet Button" on my posts.