Twitter revamps Tweet and Follow buttons with a modern new design

Visit just about any website and you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a Twitter button of some sort. Just as here at BetaNews, you’ll be offered the chance to follow the author of the article you’re reading (or the site’s Twitter feed), as well as being given the opportunity to tweet about the page you’re looking at.

Now this familiar page furniture is about to get a new look. From next month, a new set of buttons is rolling out with a fresh, flat, modern look. It’s a redesign that will please minimalists, but there are important API changes coming that will annoy some developers.

Twitter is keen to provide a uniform experience across the web, and to this end it is looking to discourage people from creating Follow and Share buttons of their own. To force people to use the new high-contrast buttons, the share count endpoint is being closed down, meaning that custom buttons are no longer a possibility. Explaining the changes in a blog post, Twitter says:

The Tweet button has displayed share count over the last five years by querying a JSON endpoint hosted on various domains. These private JSON endpoints have been used by third-party developers over the years to retrieve a simple share count of any URL. These endpoints will be shut down next month when the Tweet button removes its share count feature.

Twitter points out that the new buttons are precisely the same size as their predecessors, so web designers need not worry about page layouts getting messed up.