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Sometimes, I ask a question on stack overflow, and then go to Twitter to see if I can get help there. Any developers that follow me are immediately directed to the SO question. I've actually seen a few devs sign up for SO because of this.

The steps I follow are this -

  1. Write question on Stack Overflow
  2. Shorten the URL for my newly posted question
  3. Think of a tweet that is 140 characters - the length of the url
  4. Post the tweet

It sure would be nice if there was a "Tweet this question" button on SO. Maybe I would push it, and then a tweet would be auto-populated for me using the tags - maybe one that says "Help me with this (tag1, tag2, tag3) question on stackoverflow" and then a shortened URL.

Although some of the answers already added are wary of a million "share" buttons being added, I don't think very many people use those sites as they use twitter. In a lot of ways it's as much a question answering service as SO is, and as I described above it's helped me find answers to programming questions.

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5
  • meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3926
    – Timothy Carter
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:24
  • 1
    yadayada Greasemonkey yadayada
    – jjnguy
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:30
  • 5
    Greasemonkey is the jQuery of MetaSO.
    – TheTXI
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:34
  • I think this is a great feature request. More generally, I think that SO should be far more connected to everything -- Twitter, Facebook, etc. Right now it is an island.
    – user130657
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:54
  • I can see Jeff spamming my Twitter if he would use that on every question...
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 19:48

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
9

Not sure we need ye olde "Share This" button...

Share What Now?

Something...pure about SO not having a litany of icons at the bottom of each post...

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4
  • You said everything I did pretty much in a much shorter way.
    – TheTXI
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:27
  • 7
    Picture p == new Words[1000];
    – Omar Kooheji
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:52
  • 1
    Agreed. It is scary how sometimes I am trying to view a blog post or something and my mouse accidentally goes over the "share" icon due site and 3/4ths of the post is hidden by links!
    – Dillie-O
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:22
  • this makes my face hurt
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Aug 18, 2009 at 11:34
7

You may now also shorten the question URL in the form

example.com/q/12345

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1
  • 2
    Are there plans to register a shorter domain for the se sites?
    – jjnguy
    Commented Aug 24, 2010 at 13:18
3

You can shorten the URL by excluding the title and only including the id.

Example: "Tweet this" button

As far as a button, I would hope not. I am not a big fan of cluttering the UI with more buttons and mechanisms to use with other websites. I made this point in a previous question concerning submitting stuff to Digg. All those websites that have a jillion buttons to submit their content to a jillion different providers always has annoyed me.

I find Twitter to only be useful for harassing elected officials.

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4
  • I didn't realise Lindsey Lohan was elected.
    – Jeff Yates
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:22
  • That's not a shortened URL, it's 44 characters.
    – bpapa
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 17:08
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    @bpapa: As it is shorter than the URL with the question title it is indeed shortened. However, it is not short. But then no one claimed it was.
    – Jeff Yates
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 17:19
  • It would be nice if the URL was shorter still -- Flickr's shrink down to the fixed size: flic.kr/p/6E3Ve4 (for example) - so "questions" could be shrunk to "q" to give space for an extra 8 chars
    – Rowland Shaw
    Commented Jul 15, 2009 at 16:02
3

Firefox Users...

Integrate a "Tweet this" button with Greasemonkey

enter image description here

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6
  • Do these work in Safari or Chrome? Or... wait for it... IE?
    – bpapa
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:37
  • Does greasemonkey work in any of those browsers?
    – TheTXI
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 15:46
  • Nope. This is a FF-only solution.
    – Sampson
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:04
  • Why would you be using another browser?
    – Omar Kooheji
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:05
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    For one reason, if you're an iPhone developer. Which SO seems to have quite a lot of these days. Many of them may be using Safari. Like me. Hey let's get into a BROWSER WAR debate though, those are fun.
    – bpapa
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:06
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    REAL PROGRAMMERS USE LYNX !!!!1111!!!!!
    – hayalci
    Commented Jul 13, 2009 at 16:29

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