First there was the iPhone app which seemed to become everyone's favourite. Then atebits, the developer, set about (Mac) world domination by releasing Tweetie for Mac which brought many of the features people loved about the iPhone version into a native Mac app.
One of the added extras provided is a bookmarklet which allows you to share the web page that you are currently viewing with all of your Twitter followers in just a couple of clicks.
The bookmarklet works as advertised, but I didn't want to have to re-type what the page was I was looking at to put it into context (the shortened links don't give much away, do they!). So I set about updating the bookmarklet slighty.
What I came up with was a bookmarklet that by default creates a tweet with the page title, alongside the link.
So for instance. If I clicked it on this page, the resulting tweet would look like:
An updated Tweetie for Mac bookmarklet | Blog | Paul Stone Design (Web sites, email newsletters, flyers, brochures and emarketing from a Ealing, west London, UK freelancer):: http://paulstonedesign.com/blog/article/an-updated-tweetie-for-mac-bookmarklet
Ouch. That's almost going to be as much work deleting all the other un-needed text. Definitely not under 140 characters!
So, I changed it again so that if any text is selected in the page that is used instead of the page title. So now, if I select the words 'variation on the Tweetie for Mac bookmarklet' on this article and click the bookmarklet the resulting tweet would look like:
variation on the Tweetie for Mac bookmarklet: http://paulstonedesign.com/blog/article/an-updated-tweetie-for-mac-bookmarklet
Much more manageable! You'll still have to manually shorten the urls within Tweetie though unfortunately - if anyone's got any bright ideas on that one let me know (I thought about trying to poll one of the shortening services APIs but I think there are security issues in the browser with trying to make an AJAX call to a different server to the one you are on).
So without further ado, you can click and grab it below, and drag it up to your bookmarks bar.