Quick fix for Google Reader’s Tweet button

As reported on The Next Web, the New Twitter no longer supports the old method of setting the status through a query string, a vital part in many custom-made ‘tweet’ buttons. Instead, developers are encouraged to use the newly released ‘Web Intents’, which also offers more functionality. Unfortunately, this change also affects the built-in ‘Send To’ link in Google Reader, as many users have complained on Twitter. Until Reader updates to take care of the issue, you can manually create a ‘Send To’ link to replace the broken one, with the following parameters:

Name: Send to New Twitter
URL: http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=${title}&url=${url}
Icon URL: http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/bird/bird_blue/bird_16_blue.png

Another option would be to switch back to ‘Old Twitter’, which seems to still accept the old tweeting method, as mentioned on the Google Reader help forum. But this is clearly not a long-term solution, since the old interface will be scrapped at some point. Personally I rarely use the ‘tweet’ button, because I have enabled Reader2Twitter that syncs my shared items with Twitter in real-time. The only exception is when I send articles to my secondary Twitter account.