Sharing is the rail track on which the great wheels of social media turn and the big news is that two of the biggest engine drivers, Twitter and Facebook, have added new abilities for users to share content further. Twitter now lets users email tweets to non-Twitter users and Facebook has added long-awaited ‘share’ abilities to its iOS and Android apps.
Twitter revealed a new feature overnight that provides its users with the ability to email a tweet directly from Twitter.com, potentially leading to a significant expansion in its audience and user base as more users are prompted to engage after receiving tweets by email.
It explained this new feature will be rolling out to every existing user over the next few weeks.
“You can email a tweet to anyone, whether they use Twitter or not, right from your Twitter stream or from the details view of any tweet. Just click on the ‘More’ icon next to the reply, retweet and favorite buttons in order to email a tweet to anyone you know,” Twitter engineer Stefan Filip explained on the Twitter blog last night.
“You can add your own comment, and we’ll send an email with your comment and the tweet together. Just like that.”
Meanwhile, social media behemoth Facebook has added an ability inexcusably missing from its iOS and Android apps for too long – as well as the ability to ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on a post, users can now finally ‘share’.
Why it has taken so long for Facebook to add this function that is at the heart of the desktop experience I’ll never know. Isn’t everything supposed to be ‘mobile first’ with these guys?
Anyway, word has been flitting around the communities on Facebook that this ability is here and lo’ and behold, update 5.2 in the Apple iOS App Store for the Facebook app brought the ability to ‘share’ right into the news feed on my iPhone. Hurrah!
Facebook reveals new developer alerts service
In related news, Facebook introduced ‘Developer Alerts’ a new way for developers to receive critical information about their app on Facebook.com.
Users listed as admins and developers on an app will receive ‘breaking changes’, news on functions being changed or removed 90 days before the change happens.
‘App status changes’ will keep developers in the loop on the status of submissions to the Open Graph, such as if a change to an app has been approved.
And finally, ‘violations and enforcement’ alerts will warn admins and developers if their app doesn’t adhere to Facebook’s platform policy. For example, if an app doesn’t list a privacy policy an alert will go out while the app is forced into sandbox mode.
