Twitter Just did Something Great
They closed an annoying open loop for mobile users and decreased abandoned tweets.
Like all great discoveries, this one happened while I was looking for something else. I was verifying a bug report that involved clicking through to Wedgies from inside of the Twitter iOS app when I realized something had changed. And that is when I began grabbing every other phone in the office to make sure I hadn’t gone crazy. Then I jumped for joy!
When you want to create a path for your content off of your website and into Twitter, you have two options: 1) Use the javascript tweet button or 2) Use the web intent. I prefer to use the web intent because it gives us more control over the look and feel of icons used for sharing as well as the content of the tweet.
On a desktop or laptop, this experience works very well. A user is reading Twitter, they see a tweet with a Wedgies poll in it and click. The user votes and then shares their vote back to Twitter.
But on mobile, this has always had one high friction point that causes users to abandon their tweet. Observe:
The User sees the Wedgies link and our preview card inside of the Twitter iOS App. They click the link to answer the poll.
The user is now seeing the content on Wedgies.com, but inside the Twitter iOS app using a WebView. What do you think will happen when the user clicks the “Tweet” button?
The user is prompted to login to the Twitter Mobile Web site even though they are already inside of the Twitter iOS app! What a terrible user experience that website owners have no real control over. Some users abandon sharing the content at this point and sometimes even complain to us that Wedgies is logging them out of Twitter. What is worse, is that Twitter is losing the engagement they so need out of these users that are willing to share content back into the network.
But today, as I was verifying a bug and going through this exact same flow I was greeted with this screen after clicking on the twitter share button:
It took me a moment to realize what had happened, but when it sunk in I shouted for joy. It appears Twitter is now listening for URLs that represent Twitter Intents from web pages inside of the web view and allowing the app to handle them instead of being sent to the mobile web site! This means no longer will users have to login to the mobile web site in order to tweet content they visit through the native app!
Great work closing the loop on this one, Twitter. This is a great example of how using web standards like Web Intents can actually make future architecture challenges easier.
