Last night I changed over from using the Tweetmeme button on the blog to Twitter’s new Tweet button. Painless process and I was pleasantly suprised when the tracking for the button picked up the tweets that the posts had already received through the Tweetmeme button.

I’m running a plugin to do all the heavy lifting on it, and it provides a nice panel to include specific recommendations based on the content of the post.

There’s two interrelated problems that I have with the new button though, both to do with stats.

I like that you can put a + sign onto the end of a bit.ly link to see all of the stats for that link. The new twitter default URL shortener doesn’t appear to have that functionality at all. All you get is a link from the Tweet button to search for the link.

The second issue (and this might be related to the plugin) is that when you change the default URL shortener to bit.ly (which the Tweetmeme plugin used to use), unless you’ve already registered all of your links with your bit.ly account, you lose the tweet count that you’ve already generated.

I personally don’t track the stats that closely, but if you’re already using Tweetmeme/bit.ly and like to keep track of those sorts of things, it might be worthwhile to wait it out until Twitter gives us access to decent metrics on their t.co URL shortener.

[Update] I also suspect that bit.ly tracks re-tweets within Twitter of your URL, but the t.co engine does not. Will keep monitoring it though.