Twit This?
All the links at the bottom of the posts on this blog below the date/category/comment line are served up by FeedBurner/Google via a tool called FeedFlare. FeedFlare was built back in late 2005 well before AddThis and others built out a whole category around social sharing services for the web.
I’ve stuck with FeedFlare even though, like many of the FeedBurner services, it has languished under Google’s ownership. I really like having an identical set of engagement links on the blog and the feed and that’s the beauty of FeedFlare.
A few weeks ago, someone (can’t recall who) sent me a link to a service that puts a "tweet this" link at the bottom of a post. That reminded me that I didn’t have such a link on this blog.
So yesterday, I went into FeedFlare and searched for a service that would do that for me. I found one, called "twit this", and added it. You’ll see it now under all of the posts on this blog. For the life of me, I don’t know why it’s called "twit this" and not "tweet this" but in all other respects, it seems to work well. So if you like a post and want to tweet about it, you can use that link now.
I have noticed that FeedFlare has been on and off on this blog recently. I don’t know what that’s all about and I sure hope Google is committed to maintaining this service and it’s reliability going forward.
Comments (Archived):
Agreed on feedflare on and off – I’ve noticed this on the rss on my (and other) sites as well. Feedburner has been turned into (sadly) a big disappointment since Google took over. Immediately on the acquisition I said it would be bad and unfortunately I was right.
Strange that you have to log in to Twit This. I would have thought they could do this with simple redirects to Twitter. I hate giving out my Twitter password all the time 🙁
Maybe you saw the “twit this” feature on CabEasy(cab sharing) ?An example here: http://cabeasy.com/From-30-…Wherever it was, it’s very useful to quickly share something with the community.
adding this to my blog as well, surprised I never noticed it. Fred, also noticed that FeedFlare has outside.in integration.
why is it “stocktwits” instead of “stocktweets”?I like the ‘tweets’ better than ‘twits’.Also, Twitter doesn’t let you use “twitter” in the username, so some have gone the ‘twit’ route to shorten ‘twitter’.
I sent you the link to “TweetIt.” It’s here: http://twitter.grader.com/t… You can see it in action here: http://bit.ly/En7jIt's particularly good for static pages, or situations where you want to put particular emphasis on tweeting. Some posts are more tweetable than others.
Thanks RickI¹m going to try the bit.ly feedflare right nowI¹d like to keep all my engagement links running through feedflare if I can
Glad you enjoy! Ping me if you have any suggestions. I was also thinking ofdoing a “bit.ly Info” feedflare that displays traffic data for a post–willhave to marinate on that a bit more, though.
It could be a dynamic flare like the delicious flare.Technorati used to be dynamic but they couldn¹t make it work. Too flakey
Fred,A few weeks ago Andrew asked me about bit.ly and FeedFlare–this has been something we’ve had on our list for mission bit.ly ubiquity for quite awhile, but your post just reminded me that we still hadn’t made our Feed Flare link.Anyway, I just created a bit.ly Feed Flare called “Tweet and Track.” This link will drop you into bit.ly, shorten the URL to the original post, and set you up to tweet directly from bit.ly. What’s nice about tweeting a bit.ly link as is your can track how many people click links they send to your posts.Here is the xml file for our Feed Flare:http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTra…I added it to my Tumblr RSS if you want to check it out before installing:http://feeds.feedburner.com…
i am going to swith right away. twit this was cool, but bit.ly integration carries the day. thanks for the tip.
Fred Glad this worked — thank you K
Fred, I installed this flare a bout a year ago. i found the usage was very low and that most of people keep taking the URL and paste it directly in twitter. In general i find that people have a hard time adopting things that save them time for one simple reason: it is hard to change your behaviour on something that is not really a pain.
I agree with Ouriel. While plenty of sites offer the delicious this, friendfeed this, and tweet this link in their footer, I’m so used to just using the bookmarklets that many of these services provide. If you’re geek enough to use these services, you’re probably geek enough to understand bookmarklets too.
“I have noticed that FeedFlare has been on and off on this blog recently.”Am glad you said that Fred, as it happens to me a lot too and I thought it was my incompetence. The ShareThis icon on posts comes and goes and both the TwitThis and Bit.ly links appeared (I tested them ok) and went again. Very frustrating as it makes me start wondering if I actually installed them properly or not.