14 DAY TRIAL // About a week ago, Twitter introduced the official Tweet Button to make it easy for users to share a story or link with their followers. But this only works if the websites embed the Tweet Button. Now Twitter has introduced a Tweet Button Bookmarklet which allows users to share any link on the web with just a few clicks.
"Last week, we announced an easy-to-install and lightweight Tweet Button that allows publishers to make it easy for users to share a link to their content on Twitter. Thousands of sites have implemented the Tweet Button already," Twitter writes.
"But what if you go to a site that doesn’t have a Tweet Button? Have no fear," the blog post added.
"Today, we’re making available a Tweet Button Bookmarklet that allows you to tweet a link with your own commentary from anywhere on the web. You just need to drag and drop the Bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark bar," it announced.
In large, the Bookmarklet works very much like the Tweet Button. If you find an article, video, photo or anything else on the web that you think your followers should know about, just click on the Bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar and then add the message you want to post.
Links will be automatically shortened with the Bookmarklet as well, to make the most of the 140 character limit, using Twitter's own URL shortener.
It has another neat trick, if there are any Twitter accounts listed on the page you are sharing, the Bookmarklet page you will be able to follow those accounts. Twitter says the Bookmarklet works with most browsers out there and is straightforward to install.
While many websites that would benefit from sharing, which is pretty much all of them, already have a Tweet Button, either the official one or other implementations, the Bookmarklet covers even the rare cases where it's not available.