Reviews

Retweet buttons

We added a ReTweet button for the stories on Mattters recently and investigated several of the more popular approaches.

We had several requirements, many of which are not common:

* We needed 40, 50 or more buttons on a page.
* We needed each button to retweet a story whose url and title was not the url or title of the current page

We looked at TweetMeme’s button:

TweetMeme Retweet Button

and Topsy’s button:

Topsy Retweet Button

at the time, I do not think TweetMeme allowed us to set the title of the retweet, preferring instead to fetch the title from the url we specified (which was sloooow)

They both ended up being kind of slow for us. We had 40 or 50 to add to each page which was taking 2 or 3 seconds.

Then we found another approach on John Resig’s blog

Easy Retweet Button

This approach was much faster, and allowed us to have much more control over the bitly-ification and the fetching of the current ‘number of retweets’ to display.

Oh, and of course we have John Resig’s blog on the Mattters JavaScript News Channel :-)