hi

On a new site we wish to display Facebook and Twitter icons on some pages so that members of those services can click the link & publish on that service, so promoting our site. Facebook Share functionality seems perfect for the requirement, is there a Twitter equivalent?

We have our own URL shortening service and a short URL for each page (& therefore must use our own service, not another service).

I see one news publisher using a standard link format as follows
[twitter.com...]
this seems basic, and can obviously be expanded slightly with additional text - are there any disadvantages of using such a method?

Some large sites display a green 'retweet' button (with # of times retweeted to the left of the button) but I believe this service forces use of a public URL shortening service (which we don't want). Also, just a general twitter question, why do they term this a 'Retweet', i thought retweeting & RT was reserved for when retweeting another tweet, not a web page?

Many thanks for your comments