Tweeting our short URLs

You may, or may not, have noticed that we've made some changes to our 'Tweet this' button, which you can find to the top right-hand side of any article on the site. Now, when you click it, you should find yourself sharing a shortform version of the story's URL, starting with gu.com rather than the more familiar guardian.co.uk . That should give you a few more characters to add your own comments alongside our link in your Twitter message. This is just one of the ways that we loosely integrate the functionality of services like Twitter and Facebook into our website or mobile applications. For example, you can connect our iPhone app to your Facebook account, to make it easier to share our stories with your friends on that social network. As Information Architect on the guardian.co.uk site, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how this could work in the future, as part of a broader project we are calling 'Identity'. You'll shortly be seeing some changes to our sign in and registration pages as a result of the first phase of that project. For me the value of adding these social media functions directly into our site isn't about having trendy new web logos littering the page, or trying out new technologies. The important thing is to provide something that is of genuine use. So, thinking about Twitter specifically, I wondered what views you might have on some potential ideas for putting Twitter related tools on the page. I'm not suggesting that we are planning to do all, or indeed, any, of these, but here are some ideas we have discussed in the office. Retweet Guardian contributors There are a lot (although by no means all) of Guardian staff on Twitter, and it would be possible to make it easier for you to retweet, or reply to what they have said about a particular article, by displaying those tweets alongside the original text. Frictionless tweet Another idea is the 'frictionless tweet'. If, as a user, you were to give us permission to know about your Twitter account, we could potentially allow you to be logged into both Twitter and guardian.co.uk at the same time, and to tweet directly from our pages. Twitter hovercards One of the simplest implementations of the new @anywhere functionality from Twitter is to automatically add 'hovercards' to any Twitter address in a page. We could, when we referenced people who are on Twitter, add their Twitter username after their name, and allow you to 'follow' them directly from guardian.co.uk. Contact a politician My colleagues Chris Thorpe and Michael Brunton-Spall recently showed some prototypes of potential integrations at the Twitter developer conference - Chirp - in the US. One involved adding the Twitter details of a politician to their page on our site. This made it easy to address a tweet directly to them See who has tweeted a link A second prototype shown at the Chirp conference displayed a panel on our pages that indicated who had tweeted a particular link. We thought this might be a way to discover people on Twitter with a similar interest to yourself. As I say, the driving thought behind this from me is providing tools on the site that help you get more out of guardian.co.uk, and remove barriers to tasks that we know users are performing after visiting our pages. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm also looking to find out from users what tools they use to share our links on Twitter. For example, do you tend to use a desktop application like Tweetdeck, a bookmarklet in your browser, the 'share' button on a site, or by cutting and pasting the URL into twitter.com itself? When do you decide to share a link with your followers - after you read an intriguing headline, when you've read the first paragraph, or when you've finished the article? If you'd be interested in taking part in this research directly, via telephone or email, then please let me know by sending an email to [email protected] .