Later today, Twitter will be introducing an official embeddable tweet tool, which will let users directly embed Tweets onto web pages instead of faffing about with cut and paste or screengrabs.
The tool is much like the ’embed options’ offered by the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and Soundcloud and will let users easily slap up the full content of individual Tweets on to other sites.
Popular Tweetering types should love it too as it means that their whole quote gets republished, along with a traffic-driving link back to their Twitter profile.
The new feature comes in the shape of a snippet of code that can be used to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets (like their example below) and should be made available any time now.
Here’s Twitter’s full announcement on their blog:
Tweets are the new quotes
Have you ever been quoted in a news article or blog post? If so, you know it can be a strange experience: you recognize your words, but they never sound quite right. It’s the peril of transcription.
That’s just one of a couple reasons we like ReadWriteWeb’s approach to covering HP’s acquisition of Palm. Take a look at the article; it’s simply a hyper-curated collection of smart tweets presented with useful context. Because Marshall Kirkpatrick literally pastes in the tweets he wants to showcase, their integrity is preserved perfectly.
Finally: quotes that everybody can agree on.
Fidelity aside, think about basic readability. Imagine the traditional version of this piece: it would have quotes from all the same people strung together in paragraphs. It would probably jump back and forth between people. On ReadWriteWeb, the use of real tweets helps “chunk” the piece both visually and logically; we think it makes it easier to read.
But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have a simple alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow.
Update: No, really. It’s very simple. Just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets like the one we used here.
