Twitter introduce the Follow Button

https://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/cb481a72e0d45cf2

by wlll • 15 years ago

72 26 15 years ago

groups.google.com

rradu• 15 years ago

How is this different than the follow button used on @Anywhere? http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin

EDIT - It seems the flow is a little different. The user doesn't have to connect to the site first; it's just a one-click thing if you're already logged in. Pretty cool, except it seems a little buggy if you have SSL enabled on your Twitter account.

abraham• 15 years ago

I had some issues rendering the follow button with HTTPS only enabled too. After a couple of page refreshes it seemed to start working.

agscala• 15 years ago

This will be nice for those of us who use twitter as simply a news stream rather than a social tool. If I like a blog, I'd rather click the follow button on the blog itself rather than looking up the username and doing it through the twitter profile page.

esrauch• 15 years ago

What advantages are there for using twitter rather than RSS for this purpose?

akkartik5• 15 years ago

Nobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more understandable feedreader (http://readwarp.com).

ivankirigin• 15 years ago

Weird that they have an option to choose a language rather than just detecting the language of the browser and automatically translating the button.

jedschmidt• 15 years ago

I think it makes more sense to have the button match the language of the page content. It would be a bit jarring to see a single Japanese button on an otherwise English page.

aristidb• 15 years ago

Also, different button sizes can destroy layouts. Consider Facebook: "Like" in German becomes "Gefällt mir"...

evanw• 15 years ago

The Follow button uses Twitter's "web intents" that have been available for a while now (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents).

You can also use web intents to do things like compose, reply, retweet, or favorite a tweet.

mrkurt• 15 years ago

It's a little slicker than intents since it's one click when you're logged in. It dumps you to the normal intent page when not logged in, though.

startupcto• 15 years ago

It's just a button, is this really worth the hoopla? I find it funny how Twitter can make the deal out of the most ordinary thing, like Fail Whale and of course the "Follow Button".

muppetman2• 15 years ago

I think this means Twitter has peaked. As in now they're trying hard to get existing users to "do more" (follow more people) because there's not many people signing up anymore. It's not like following people has been hard previously.

In exactly the same way that Facebook now doesn't have many people signing up, so instead they desperately keep shoving "People you may know!" at you, even though you've never heard of Ima Stalker before.

codelust• 15 years ago

User acquisition will always peak at some stage for most companies (the universe being the total number of people with access to the internet), so the attempt drive more usage is not surprising.

I do believe, though, that Twitter has lost its way since end 2009 and are largely making stuff up as they go along. It is also fair to assume that they will have pressures to ramp up monetization as they run out of time to bridge the gap between potential and actual revenues. Such is the curse of an insanely high valuation.

alain94040• 15 years ago

agreed [when are the points coming back - 2600 to 1600 is a pretty clear vote]

instakill• 15 years ago

Facebook has recently hit 700m users. How do they not have "many people signing up"?

muppetman2• 15 years ago

I should have said "as many" - the stampede they had isn't there anymore.

Twitter introduce the Follow Button

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