Is the Official Twitter Button worse than Tweetmeme’s? & Other Concerns

This is the  customized button you can create at Twitter that you may have heard about during any point in time in the last few days when you were not an under-rock dweller.

You can control variables such as:

• the type of button (Big/small with/without Tweet count, or just a small button that simply says Tweet) ,
• what the text in the Tweet publisher says once you click the button (Title of the page or something else),
• what URL will be tweeted (the page the button is on or something else), as well as
• the language (I’m gonna stick with English. Call it a hunch but I don’t think I’ll be  tweeting in any other language in the near future.)

(I have WordPress, and put mine right above the section for metadata at the end of my post. Not all themes are the same, so you might want yours above the comment section.)

I found several unexpected problems with Twitter’s button though.

The first is probably just due to expectations on my part. I thought that since this would be served directly from the Twitter database, it may pick up tweets that were occasionally missed by Tweetmeme. That case is rare though, and usually correlated with Twitter being down.

The second was that the Official Twitter button would be at least as accurate as Tweetmeme’s, which I have not found to be the case. I used to think Tweetmeme’s was incorrect, when it would list more tweets than the number that I had showing as comments at the bottom of the page.

The thing is, I soon learned that with the Tweetmeme button, the numbers would soon sync up. It appears that so far, the official Twitter button is not accurate, at least not with recent posts.

I found a really strange case in a recent post where Tweetmeme claims the link was Tweeted 7 times. The tweets showing in the comments only number four [1,2,3, & 4]. You’d think that if the Tweetmeme button was over-estimating, the official Twitter button would at least include the tweets that were on the page.

Initially, my thoughts were that this had to do with Twitter being down a few times today – but then why are the older posts mostly accurate? It’s really quite odd.

The, third problem probably affects many more people than nitpickers like me. If you don’t understand how or where to put the code in your theme, you’re pretty much screwed.  I found three solution for that below.

Another thing I found is a curious fact  I was following up on after @Scobelizer tweeted about it.

Twitter’s new official button uses the more popular @ mention format (e.g. via @Tinu), rather than the new “official” format of the retweet link that debuted on Twitter last November. Could they be phasing this less popular function back out? Or was it always intended as a Twitter-only thing?

Last but not least, if you don’t want to mess with code and you’re on WordPress, here are some options I found.

Tested WordPress Alternatives:

New Twitter Button v.0.1.2b
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/new-twitter-button/

Like the Official Twitter button, it’s not accurate for Tweet counts from the last 24 hours, but very precise for older ones. Seems like this would work going forward, so if you haven’t made new blog posts in a couple of days, this one is good to install for the least amount of muss and fuss.

It also had no settings or controls – which could be a benefit or a disadvantage, depending on your level of anal retentiveness or control issues.

It just installed the big button with count at the top and the small with count at the bottom. I’d like to see one with just the word Tweet on posts that pre-date Twitter and haven’t been tweeted- not just on this plugin, but on any one. That way old posts don’t seem so … pathetic … even when they were popular at the time, or are evergreen in usefulness.

Twitter Tweet Button v1.1
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tweet-button/

Same as above, but  it has an options section – mine showed up at the bottom of the left navigation in the Dashboard. So it has the same wrong numbers for posts from Friday, but seems fine for posts 90 days back or more.

WP Tweet Button V 1.2.1 (not latest)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-tweet-button/

If you have other plugins that make text appear after your post, it overlaps instead of wrapping around them. It also starts all tweets over from zero instead of inheriting the existing number of tweets about that link.

That bugs me, but it has lots of options and when I installed it, was curiously more accurate on recent posts than the other button. Weird.

Are you going to change your button? Why or Why Not? I’d love to hear your thoughts.