Not to be outdone by Facebook — or even TweetMeme for that matter — Twitter has officially rolled out its own Tweet Button for web sites. The Tweet Button lets users link to content on third-party sites with a mouse click.
Let’s say you are on CNN.com (which happens to be one of the early adopters of the Tweet Button) and you read an article that wows you. The Tweet Button lets you click a link and share the article with your friends via your Twitter account. No need to cut and paste the URL, shrink it down to size with bit.ly, or jump through any other hoops. The Tweet Button does all that automatically.
“Twitter is great for sharing interesting things you find on the web. In fact, close to a quarter of all Tweets include a link in them,” a Twitter rep wrote on the company blog. “Despite the high volume of sharing, there is plenty of room to make it easier. Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a link in a Tweet is too much work.”
Expanding Twitter’s Universe
Twitter’s Tweet Button capabilities don’t stop with simple sharing. After you post a story to Twitter, you may also see suggestions for other Twitter users to follow. Twitter bases these suggestions on the web site you visited. The list of suggestions may even include CNN.com, if you posted an article from CNN, or the reporter who wrote the article.
“The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites,” the Twitter rep said. “It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their…