Just last night we were talking about the speed at which information is shared on the web, primarily through Twitter and Facebook. The default options for both of those services make you go to another page to do your sharing. A new service, TwittLink, wants to bring Twitter sharing to your page by way of a widget.
Basically, this is just a lightweight widget that a website owner installs via a simple line of JavaScript (or a slightly longer script with customizable parameters). You will then see a TwittLink tab on the left hand side of your page, not unlike the feedback tabs that companies like Get Satisfaction offer. Clicking on this tab pops open a full Twitter client. Once you authenticate yourself via OAuth, you can then tweet from here, see your followers updates, see tweets about that particular site, and see tweets sent from the TwittLink tab on that particular site.
But to share pages you are on as quickly as possible, you also have to install TwittLink’s own Retweet button. It looks to be an exact copy of Tweetmeme’s popular button, but it’s in orange instead of green. And clicking on it launches the TwittLink widget rather than populating the tweet area on Twitter.com. If you’re willing to install both things on your site, it will save your readers some time in sharing, as they will never have to leave your page.
The ability to see other users who are tweeting from the same site you are on in real-time is interesting. But if TwittLink were to take off it could face questions from both Tweetmeme over the button (this happened previously with Retweet.com), and Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network over the name (this happens quite a bit).
Update: Also check out TBUZZ (our coverage).
Scary fast.
Is it possible to use TwittLink on a Wordpress blog? Cause I would really like this.
Shared links are the currency of Twitter. That’s why we built http://www.tweetiator.com, so you can see who tweets links to your content. We’ll be getting in touch with Twittlink, it looks intriguing.
How are they going to make ‘real’ money? I see one block of Adsense, that’s it.
interesting how twitter has become, and so fast, such a huge source of communication.
interesting how twitter has become, and so fast, a huge source of communication for people and businesses.
I love this tool as a form of comms for a site – I think this serves the purpose of get satisfaction or meebo site chat – what else will we see as a twitter app
BigTweet is another Twitter client which comes in both a bookmarklet and WordPress plugin form – http://www.bigtweet.com/
Lots of convenience features.
More information in the comments on this TechCrunch article:
http://j.mp/uZ0YN
Scott
Interesting facts
http://twurl.cja.org.uk is just as simple and has a bookmarklet so every site you visit can be shared on Twitter.
Does anyone smell a copycat here?
Their site as a whole seems to be a Tweetmeme copy blatantly the retweet buttons are a complete copy of concept… Then we move onto this new feature and has anyone noticed the similarities to http://Tweetboard.com/ ?
Of course people have they are tweeting about it but how far with this cheep cloning will this site go?
Anyone else see what I am seeing?
…and Tweetmeme copied the button concept from Digg, not to mention that the owner has been accused of borrowing someone else’s idea of a Twitter memetracker. A good idea is always taken over and continues to be developed. It’s an unending circle, and it’s futile to try to find the begging. If you would have taken the time, you would have seen that the Twitter client concept differs between Twittlink and Twittboard.