Twitter introduces new way to prefill status – forgets to tell everyone

Phil Hancox — Wed, 18 May 2011 23:07:58 +0000

Today whilst doing my coding thing for School for Startups, I was informed that the Twitter links at the bottom of posts weren’t working any more. Basically, they are simply Tweet links that automatically populate your status with a tweet before publishing – you’ve seen them before – “Reading this article at www.example.com”. But, despite me only implementing them literally a couple of days ago and testing thoroughly, they had bizarrely stopped working. Testing and research led nowhere until I discovered this retweet from the ever helpful Mark Boyd:

Still using the old “status=foobar” query string in your links to pre-populate status text? Switch to Web Intents: dev.twitter.com/pages/intents

— Arnaud Meunier (@rno) May 17, 2011

Apparently, Twitter has switched off the old method of pre-filling statuses and turned on a new one. Without telling anyone. I might have dropped my eye off the ball, but I’m certain I’ve seen no blog posts from either Twitter or the blogosphere warning about a switchover, perhaps a certain amount of time for developers for change the links etc.

The new system is pretty fancy. Called “intents”, you can add your link and it will open a small window with a nicely designed interface for you to login (if necessary) and then post a tweet, retweet something, reply – whatever. It is quite nice and I may go into it more in a future post but for those of you who, like me, missed the announcement, here’s what changes to make:

Your original link to prefill a Twitter status might have looked like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=My+tweet+to+@philhancox+goes+here

You need to change it to this:

http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=My+tweet+to+@philhancox+goes+here

It’s simple but there are all kinds of things you can do with the new system. I recommend you check out the official documentation. But any chance of more warning next time, Twitter?

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Twitter introduces new way to prefill status – forgets to tell everyone