Twitter To Launch Official "Tweet Button," Could Impact Third-Party Developer Relationships
Documents leaked to Mashable Tuesday evening show that Twitter is prepared to launch an official "Tweet Button" as soon as this week.
Although details are still scarce, the new Tweet Button has the potential to disrupt several companies within the Twitter micro-economy, and strain already-frayed relationships with some third-party Twitter developers.
TweetMeme is likely to be most strongly affected by the new release, given that their product is essentially the same. That said, Mashable and others have speculated a deal could be in the works. As of 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the TweetMeme was temporarily unavailable due to "failed networking equipment," only adding to the mystery and perhaps indicating that official announcements by both Twitter and TweetMeme could be coming today.
Also interesting within the leaked documents is news that the official Tweet Button will use Twitter's own URL shortener, the highly coveted t.co, the shortest possible domain (equal to NPR's n.pr). This could spell trouble for third-party URL shorteners such as bit.ly and TinyURL, and could lead to significant changes with the way URLs are displayed in third-party Twitter clients as well as the Twitter.com website.
From a developer's standpoint, the button appears to be as easy to install as the @anywhere API, likely leading to rapid adoption of the new button upon it's official release.
Image via Mashable.com
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