Twitter Launch Embeddable Tweets

A new blog post from the Twitter media team suggests that the company will launch an embeddable tweets feature sometime tomorrow.

Most of the time, when a blog or website wants to add specific tweets to its blog posts (say, like, this one), it has to either quote the text or screenshot the tweets and put them in the post. Suffice it to say, the former doesn’t have have the same impact as the latter, but the latter is a time-intensive affair.

That’s why Twitter’s cryptic blog post today piqued our interest. The company alludes to these issues, using ReadWriteWeb as an example. But it’s the last paragraph that really gives it away:

“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.”

Embedded tweets are almost certainly coming, and while we don’t know what form they will take, they should become popular. We’re personally tired of making screenshots of tweets, and an alternative that includes the ability to learn more about (or follow) the people who are quoted will be welcomed with open arms.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will report back when we learn more.

Update: Here’s what they’ll look like (via the Twitter Media blog):

Here is the email response Twitter gave us explaining what the new feature is all about:

“It’s a super super simple piece of code to help people generate nice HTML tweets instead of using screen-grabbed images. It’s something that Robin Sloan has been using for Twitter Media & is now sharing. That’s it!”

Seems very straightforward overall.

via Mashable