A +1 Surge

This obviously represents a major surge for Google’s +1 buttons, which is even more remarkable given that these buttons currently don’t actually do much. When users click on these widgets, the action is only reflected on their Google profiles and sometimes appear in other users’ search results. The fact that so many sites are now adopting this button, though, shows how much confidence most of these businesses have in Google’s ability to turn these buttons into something useful for them, both for SEO purposes as well as for social sharing.

Twitter’s Share and Instant Follow widgets lag behind Google, though they are also still quite new and are also growing quickly.

Most Sites Still Don’t Leverage Sharing Buttons

Overall, though, these numbers are also a good reminder that most brands are still not leveraging the power of social sharing. Facebook’s Like box may be dominant in comparison to the other buttons, but even the most ubiquitous of sharing widgets is only being used by about 11% of the Web’s 10,000 largest sites.

You can download the full report here.

Google, being late to the party, had the advantage of being able to learn from Twitter, Facebook and every other social network out there right now.

Note: I’m consciously not saying that it’s a threat to Facebook (at least not for now), as I think the group dynamics and strong network effect that made Facebook what it is today will continue to be relevant and have locked users in for now.

Twitter’s Problem and Google’s Advantage

What Google+ makes abundantly clear is that Twitter’s success was a happy accident. While Google was able to bake all of Twitter’s current core functions (status updates, /replies/retweets/shares/photo sharing etc.) into its service at launch, Twitter grew organically. That, at the time, was to Twitter’s advantage. Now, however, it is holding the company’s growth back, as those conventions that grew out of this are anything but intuitive for newcomers. Indeed, one could argue that everything Twitter has done over the last few months was meant to rein this chaos in.

Why Twitter Should be Concerned

So here is why I think Twitter should be very concerned:

It’s Everywhere Google Is: Google added a Google+ notification icon to the Sandbar (the black bar that sits on top of every Google product now). It’s crack. It keeps drawing you back to Google+. If you regularly use search, Gmail or Google Docs, Google+ will also be just one click away.

Even though Google’s +1 buttons don’t do much yet, those buttons will soon be connected to Google+ in some form as well, giving Google+ an instant presence on virtually every major website.

Circles: Google took Twitter’s asymmetric follower model and put some great twists on it. Thanks to this, you can use Google+ just like you would use Twitter: to follow interesting people. When they share something publicly, it will appear in your stream.

While Google is mostly describing circles as a way to share content privately or semi-privately with select groups, it’s also an easy way to create Twitter-like lists with interesting people you would like to follow. Consuming content – whether from your friends or media brands – will become a major part of the Google+ experience.

Comments: Twitter’s @replies are clunky at best and hard to explain to new users. On Google+, you just leave a comment and a real and real-time discussion can form around the content. That is far more compelling and easier to use than using @replies. Google uses +replies in these comment threads to make these discussions even easier to follow and to push out notifications to the Sandbar when somebody mentions you.

Google+ Will be a Platform: Currently, there are no APIs for developers to write products that could hook into Google+. That means we can’t have aggregation tools, third-party clients or anything else that has become standard in the Twitter ecosystem right now.

All of that is coming, though, and while Twitter has managed to squander most of its developer community’s trust, Google doesn’t have to worry about that at all. Indeed, Google will likely be able to offer access to the Google+ firehose to anybody who wants it, free of charge.

No artificial character limits: For a long time now, Twitter’s proponents have argued that Twitter’s 140 character limit was an advantage. It keeps posts brief and to the point. Once you use Google+ for a bit, though, you come to realize that those constraints are really just annoying at the end – and likely hard to explain to a mainstream user anyway.

Google Doesn’t Have to Worry About Monetization: After all these years, Twitter still hasn’t figure out how to make money in a way that won’t alienate its users. Google can just stick some AdSense ads into the Google+ sidebar if it really wants to monetize Google+ directly.

Hangouts: Built-in video chats are a killer feature. Nobody else is doing anything this slick right now.

There are lots of other small reasons why I think Google+ could threaten Twitter: built-in photo sharing, for example, the potential for making it a platform for working collaboratively and extending it to every other Google product in some form. Then, there are the mobile apps for the mobile web, Android and iPhone (iPhone is coming soon). Those include a group messaging feature and Foursquare-like check-ins.

What do You Think?

What do you think? I’m I too optimistic about Google+ here and too down on Twitter? Let me know in the comments.

This feature is starting to roll out to “a small percentage of users” today, so don’t worry if you don’t see it yet. According to Twitter, it will eventually be available for everyone.

If you’re currently using your own third-party URL shortener, it will continue to work just fine. Given that Twitter doesn’t offer any analytics services around t.co links, chances are that more advanced users will stick with bit.ly and its competitors for the time being.

Twitter, of course, has become rather infamous for replicating features that its developer ecosystem developed without the company’s help. It looks like third-party URL shorteners could be the next group of apps that Twitter will slowly replace with its own services.

Here is Twitter’s step-by-step guide for how this new feature will work:

1. Start typing or paste a long URL into the Tweet box.
2. After you’ve entered the first 13 characters of a URL, a message will appear at the bottom of the Tweet box, letting you know that the link will appear shortened. (Fig. 1)
3. Notice that even if you’ve reached the character limit, you can continue to add text to the URL with no consequence.
4. Once the Tweet is posted, it will be assigned a t.co link ID, but the link will appear as a shortened version of the original URL, so people who see your Tweet will know the site they are going to (Fig. 2, above). Yep! It’s now that easy.

Twitter Follow Button

In some ways, Twitter’s Follow button currently feels like the forgotten stepchild of the Facebook Like box. As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted on Twitter earlier today, the fact that it doesn’t show the faces of followers like Facebook’s box feels like a missed opportunity. According to Twitter developer Ryan Sarver, though, this feature could be coming in a future release.

Will People Use Google’s +1 Buttons

We’ll write more about Google +1 buttons once they’re released tomorrow, but one of the reasons why I’ve been rather skeptical about Google’s +1 initiative is that there really isn’t a good reason why a user would press the +1 button instead of the Facebook ‘like’ button or a Twitter share button instead.

I’m not aware of any research about this, but my guess is that most users who do use these tools only pick one button when they decide to share a story with their friends and then move on. With Facebook and Twitter, it’s clear where those shares end up. With +1, they could one day end up on a friend’s search results page, but I’m not sure that provides enough motivation for somebody to actually use this feature.

Keeping your DMs Safe

How exactly Twitter will determine that an app doesn’t need access to your direct messages isn’t clear, but it’s good to see that the company is closing this major security and privacy loophole. Until now, your direct messages were accessible to any third-party app that asked for it as Twitter’s API only supported two types of account authorization: read-only and read-write. There was no way to block third-party apps from accessing your direct messages.

New Permissions Screen

The new permissions screen will also help to explain to users what data you are sharing with a third-party service. To see which apps currently have access to your Twitter data, just head over to the “applications” page for your Twitter account.

This new version will replicate some of the functionality of the new desktop version of Twitter. Tweets with images, for example, will display previews of these photos and you will be able to easily switch back and forth between @mentions, messages, your lists and trending topics with the help of a navigation bar at the top of the screen.

Given that Twitter already offers native apps for these platforms, upgrading its mobile site was likely not a priority for the company. At the same time, though, it’s good to see the company finally upgrade the mobile web experience.

As much as I would prefer to see a healthy ecosystem of Twitter apps, I can’t help but think that it makes sense for Twitter to buy TweetDeck, especially given what we know about Twitter’s priorities these days.

Here is why I think this move makes sense for Twitter:

• TweetDeck is highly popular with Twitter’s heaviest users. Twitter is working hard on bringing more casual users to its service – even if it’s just for consuming news – but it doesn’t currently have any worthwhile in-house offerings for heavier users. While its mobile clients are quite good, the only desktop client Twitter currently offers is for the Mac and while it’s alright, it lacks quite a few of the features that power users would expect.
• Rumor has it – and I’d take this with a grain of salt – that UberMedia acquired TweetDeck earlier this year. This rumor was never confirmed. Assuming UberMedia had bought TweetDeck, it would have controlled over 20% of all traffic on Twitter, something Twitter was likely not willing to let happen without a fight. Chances are that if both Twitter and UberMedia are interested in TweetDeck, Twitter will win the bidding war.
• With the acquisition of Tweetie, Twitter already has some experience in adopting third-party clients to its in-house style.
• Twitter has already said that it thinks all of these different clients are too confusing for its users. Turning the most popular third-party client into an official one (Twitter Pro?) takes care of this problem.
• TweetDeck’s browser-based client (freely available for Chrome and as a closed beta for all other browsers) is actually better than Twitter’s own website (though not quite as good as Seesmic Web, in my opinion).
• Twitter wants to have full control over its ecosystem.

Of course, there are also some cons. TweetDeck would be the only Adobe AIR-based client in its stable. It would also be the only one with support for Facebook (but that’s easily rectified, I imagine).

Consequence: A Twitter Monoculture

Overall, then, I think it would make sense for Twitter to buy TweetDeck. I’m not sure I like this idea, though. Twitter, it seems, wants to build a monoculture of official clients. This will hold back innovation and hurt Twitter in the long run (how much innovation have we seen from Twitter itself lately, after all?). Twitter needed the third-party ecosystem to grow during its early days and I can’t help but think that it still needs it today.

TweetDeck is obviously not the first Twitter client to go this route. Seesmic, for example, has been offering a web-based version of its client for a long time already. Just like Seesmic, TweetDeck’s web version will look very similar to the original desktop-based product. One major difference, however, is that it will no support Twitter streaming.

For now, this is a private beta only. Only whitelisted TweetDeck accounts will be able to access to the beta at this point. You can sign up to be whitelisted here.

Today, however, just as the complaints gained steam thanks to the #dickbar hashtag on Twitter itself (named after Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo), the company’s self-described “communications guy” Sean Garrett announced that Twitter had already submitted a new version of the app to Apple yesterday “that makes it so the quick bar doesn’t overlay on Tweets.”

While the fact that the quick bar was often blocking the view of some tweets was indeed annoying, the problem here is that the whole concept of the quick bar is annoying to begin with. Indeed, most of the complaints I’ve seen so far have more to do with the existence of the quick bar in the first place and not the way the trends were displayed.

Instead of just fixing this minor bug, Twitter should just make it either optional or giving users a way to pay for the app to make it go away. It’s understandable that Twitter wants to push promoted trends (though, of course, the fact that they have to be promoted means they aren’t really trends to begin with…). In a tweet he posted a short while ago, however, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo argued that giving users the option to turn this feature off would be an “inelegant implementation.” In other tweets, including this one directed at Robert Scoble, he  also argued that Twitter should have left the promoted tweets out of the quick bar.

The underlying problem here (more so than the inelegant implementation) seems to be that Twitter thinks there is value in seeing these trends, while for many users, they are simply useless reminders of the fact that there are a lot of Justin Bieber and Charlie Sheen fans on Twitter, too.

Alternatives

Of course, there are also multiple other Twitter clients for iOS that you could use if you don’t like the official ones. Among the best are the Seesmic app and Echofon.

For Twitter, of course, this makes sense. After all, it sells promoted trends for good money (Google Hotpot bought a spot today, for example). For the most part, trending topics on Twitter tend to be dominated by celebrity gossip and Justin Bieber. It’s hard to see how this makes the app better, unless you really care about Charlie Sheen (trend: #tigerblood – no idea why…), the fact that it’s #Friday and that people care about #BYU, #iTunes and #Facebook.

Doing a search for “quick bar” on Twitter, it’s clear that most users feel this way. Sadly, Twitter doesn’t give users the ability to turn this “feature” off. In its own announcement, Twitter called the “quick bar” a “very cool update.” I beg to differ and hope that Twitter will either allow people to turn this off for free or sell an ad-free version soon.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter for Mac is a decent, lightweight client for those who only follow their closest friends and family members (and maybe a few celebrities), but it’s no replacement for clients like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic.

The Bad:

Here are a few examples of what I didn’t like about the app:

• What makes the Twitter for iPad app so great is that links open up in a third pane and don’t take you away from the app. Twitter for Mac does away with this. Clicking on a tweet in your timeline does absolutely nothing and clicking on links brings up your browser.
• The app has amnesia. The moment you click away from the lists view, it will forget what list you were looking at before and you’ll have to click through to that list again.
• Same thing for searches. Do a search and click away from it to see your direct messages, for example, and the app will have no recollection of what you just searched for when you click on the search button again. Annoying.
• No button to start a new tweet? You have to either use the keyboard shortcut (and one of the nicest features is that the app allows you to set a global hotkey for new tweets) or click through the menu at the bottom of the screen to start a new tweet.
• If there is a conversations view, it’s hidden away. I haven’t found it yet.
• No support for third-party URL-shorteners? Seriously?
• Clicking on a person’s avatar bring up a timeline, not the person’s profile.
• I know I’m nitpicking now, but this is quite annoying as well: the minimalist interface makes it hard to drag the app across the screen. You have to find a spot on the sidebar to actually move the app around.

The OK:

Not all is bad, of course. The app is lightweight, fast and new tweets happily scroll across your screen in real time. A global hotkey for sending new tweets is a nice feature as well. So is support for multiple accounts, which the app also handles quite nicely.

Over on TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld calls the app a “half-hearted attempt” – an apt description. For now, you won’t miss much if you stay away from it.

But these “shared by” links are clearly new – and more and more people are now seeing them, too, so this seems to be more than just one Google’s many bucket tests and could be here to stay. These links tend to appear underneath links to news items in the OneBox news results section when you search for recent events. Another new feature is a live count of recent updates that now appears underneath the “Recent Updates” box when you search for keywords that are currently popular or trending on Twitter and Facebook.

All of this points to a new emphasis of real-time search results in Google. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan speculates that Google could soon restrict these searches to just your friends, which is entirely possible and would make sense in light of Bing’s recent addition of more social features, but I actually find the new focus on real time more interesting. All of these new links, after all, point to Google’s real-time search feature, which was mostly hidden from sight until now. Instead of just pointing to a somewhat cryptically names “Updates” section in the sidebar, this new test actually explains that these updates come from “Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and more.”

To use the bookmarklet, you simply drag and drop a link to your bookmarks bar and you are ready to go. You can find the official Twitter bookmarklet here.

Twitter, of course, has every interest in getting users to share more content on its service. Most of Twitter’s more mainstream audience will probably puzzled by the idea of a bookmarklet, but the team does a good job at explaining how to use the new tool.

Looks like Twitter is launching its own Tweet buttons later this week. While you can already embed the code (see below), not everybody can actually use the button to retweet the post yet.

Just for the sake if it, I have embedded the code (courtesy of Mashable) here.

I’m guessing we will see a new wave of discussions about Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers over the next week, as this move will likely put Tweetmeme (which is more well-known for its retweet buttons than for its core product) out of business in the long run. I know I wouldn’t invest in a Twitter-releated company at this point…

That, of course, is a major achievement for any company. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that TweetDeck is now 5 times larger than its closest competitor.

Looking Ahead

According to Dodsworth, Tweetdeck’s “mission is to help our users manage and harness these information flows. To that end, we are moving towards being truly multi-stream, re-building our clients from the ground-up with multi-stream functionality ingrained rather than simply bolting on new disconnected networks.”

TweetDeck wants to be at the intersection of all of the multiple networks that its users use and ensure that it doesn’t make a difference on which network somebody says something.

Of course, like many of its competitors, TweetDeck is also still looking to effectively monetize its service. For the time being, it still isn’t clear how TweetDeck plans tomonetize its service.

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