We are fast approaching a major milestone in Retweet Buttons and within weeks we will have passed being live on over 200,000 websites. In conjunction we have recently passed serving 500 million button impressions daily. To assist our continued growth we are today releasing a major update to the button to include international language support.

Two parts of the button have translation features,

Firstly the button itself and the pop-up you get when you click to do the retweet are now translated into 7 languages English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. We will then be putting up an area to crowd source the translations to other languages.

Secondly we have integrated Google Translate to automatically translate any stories you retweet into your own language. This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire.

The new language support is on top of an impressive feature set,

• The best user and publisher retweets experience
• URL Shortener Support (including BIT.LY Pro)
• Mobile Phone Support (iPhone, Android)
• Image Button – that allows the embedding into RSS + Emails
• Spaces – allows you to control how many white spaces you leave at the end of the tweet
• Hash Tag support

If you are website owner you can read all the technical details of the changes on our help page, if you want to install the button from scratch visit our installation page.

UPDATE

As some of you who already use our button with the language translation are already aware we initially released our translations as an opt out, due to the popular demand for an opt in process instead we have now swapped that around so you can now opt into your tweets being translated into your local language.

Whatever people think about short url’s we think they are here to stay, not only are they handy for fitting into your tweets they are also an invaluable way to track users behavior throughout social media. Each short url can be tracked as it is passed about by users. Data can be built up on when and who clicked through and where they all came from, this in turn lets marketeers track the success or failure of their campaigns.

Shortening 101

We have been working for several months behind the scenes with a whole range of the short url services so that we could bring publishers a unique range of services built upon the most popular of these services. So far TweetMeme has either taken whatever short url it first spotted, and or we re-shortened via a shortlist of highly reliable + scalable services (e.g. bit.ly). You have all been vocalising your desire to customize this and we have been listening.

Included in the next release (happening this week) is the ability to choose which short url you want. For automated shortening we support 7 of the most popular shortening services and will be adding more over the coming weeks. On top of that we already support personalized shortening (where you supply an API key so that the tracking data is then individual to yourself) for 3 of those services. And again we will continue to work with our partners to add further support.

And best of all, all of them work with our ‘One-Click’ retweet that lets users retweet without leaving the site the button is on.

As we announced last Friday we are also releasing the ability to place retweet buttons in RSS & Emails

If you run a shortening service or have one that your would like to see supported please get in touch or via @tweetmemedev.