There are already a lot of ‘new Twitter’ guides and helpful notes out there about all the changes Twitter’s been making recently, so I’m just going to summarise some of the most interesting bits, and link to the best guides I’ve found for understanding it all.
So the ‘buzz’ and potentially most interesting development revolves around the web intents they released back in September. This allows you to embed a tweet:
.@hmtreasury the people want @MrGeorgeOsborne to regulate #foodspeculation? Or is he on the side of the banks? j.mp/v73xf0
— Tom Allen (@geecologist) December9, 2011
Nifty eh?
How about this for a meta-embed – the auto-tweet about this blog post:
Web: How to use the new Twitter geecologist.org/2011/how-to-us…
— Tom Allen (@geecologist) December 10, 2011
You can simply copy and paste some javascript code having clicked embed by the tweet you want, simple. Alternatively web intents also support an oEmbed endpoint which allows for dynamic calling of certain tweets based on URL or ID number of tweets. This could be used in some very interesting ways, so looking forward to seeing the bright ideas flow around it!
Another new killer development is the new buttons Twitter have introduced. They have refreshed the look and functionality of the embeddable buttons to Tweet, Follow and Hashtag.
Below are all the large buttons as examples:
Share this link
Tweet
Follow
Follow @geecologist
Hashtag
Tweet #geek
Mention:
Tweet to @geecologist
But still no decent URL shortener. So still essentially useless compared to the 3rd party apps.
That’s true. And seems weird given how forcefully they’ve implemented t.co to overwrite most other links. Wouldn’t have thought it would be hard to do either…