SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter is trying to make it quicker and easier to track the world's most interesting people on its short-messaging service. The new short cut is being provided by a Twitter “follow” button that can be placed on websites to highlight celebrities, athletes, reporters and other people who tweet their thoughts and share other information. More than 50 websites already have agreed to use the new feature announced Tuesday. The publishers latching on to Twitter's Follow button include AOL Inc., Yahoo Inc., The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and TV Guide. The famous people using the feature include Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga, who already has the most Twitter followers at 10.6 million. Twitter already had been offering a “tweet” button to help websites attract links to their content. Twitter billed the button as “a new way to follow Twitter accounts directly from the websites you visit every day.” The feature was rolled out the same day Web advertising company AdGrok announced it has been bought by San Francisco-based Twitter. “When Twitter approached us and asked if we'd be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn't pass up,” AdGrok said in a blog post. “Starting today, we will be working full-time on Twitter's revenue engineering team.” Twitter took in $45 million in global advertising revenue in 2010 and was on track to more than triple that figure this year, according to industry tracker eMarketer.
