TwittLink: Share Fast And Tweet From Your Site With Others

6 Oct 2009

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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).