Twitter Adds Embedding Option For Tweets

Twitter has announced the launch of embeddable tweets on 4 May, so that revelent tweets can be inserted into news stories and blog postings, in the same YouTube videos are added to liven up content.

No More Screenshots

To date, bloggers using Twitter tweets to shape their news content have simply taken screenshots of relevant tweets and copied them and pasted them into their posts.

Twitter’s Media blog points to this post from ReadWriteWeb as an example of a “hyper-curated” collection of tweets presented with context.

While Twitter said it appreciates ReadWriteWeb’s use of real tweets to bring the piece together, the company’s officials see the pasted-in image of a tweet as a hack job. To wit, the company is launching the ability to let users add a code snippet “to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets.”

Robin Sloan, who works on media partnerships at Twitter, told ReadWriteWeb’s Marhsall Kirkpatrick embeddable tweets “employ a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image).”

See the example on the Twitter Media blog here. Note that users can click the link to go straight to the account of the Twitter user who published the tweet, as well as the original tweet.

Popular For Bloggers

This feature should be hugely popular among bloggers looking to curate tweets for context in stories they write. But it is unclear how far this will extend beyond the average Twitter user tweeting their daily habits, such as what they had for breakfast or where they had lunch.

The move comes a couple weeks after Twitter wrapped up its Chirp developer conference.

There Twitter executives unveiled the company’s advertising plans and @anywhere effort to extend Twitter beyond Twitter. Twitter also assured developers they would not find their work cannibalised if they built the right applications.

Twitter has also unveiled Twitter mobile clients for Blackberry, iPhone (circa Tweetie) and Android.