Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

'Quoted' and Embedded Tweets Get All Up in Your Blog Posts

by Amar Toor on May 4, 2010 at 11:00 AM

quoted and embedded tweets
Whenever a small tweet becomes a big story, you're all but guaranteed to see the same, individual screenshot pop up on blogs across the Web. It may look rudimentary, but it's always been the easiest way to visually structure an article around an important tweet, or series of them. Now, however, those screenshots may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to Twitter's decision to make its tweets fully embeddable within other websites.

In a blog post titled 'Tweets are the new quotes,' Twitter acknowledged that "a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack," and promised to introduce an alternative solution today. ReadWriteWeb asked the company for more information, and Robin Sloan, who works at Media Partnerships at Twitter, gave the following elaboration: "The alternative is super-simple: just 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). Should be a handy tool -- (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media)." Twitter cited this volcano ash cloud post as an example of what the new tweets will look like when embedded within text.

With the entire Twitter archive making its way to the Library of Congress soon, as well, tweets have officially made it to the Public-Discourse Big Leagues. Now, if only more than a few of them said anything worthwhile. [From: Twitter and ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: bloggers, embedded, html, images, quotes, screenshots, socialnetworking, top, tweet, twitter

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular