Twitter has spent the last few months streamlining its service by cracking down on third-party apps and releasing its own tools instead, citing the need for consistency and reliability for its users. Whether or not that is actually good for Twitter users is up for debate, but Twitter keeps churning out new features that it hopes will catch on with its fanbase.
Twitter users now have the ability to embed interactive Tweet timelines into any website, Twitter said in a blog post on Wednesday.
“When you browse websites that have embedded a Twitter timeline, you can now interact with it in the same way you do on twitter.com. Expand Tweets to see photos, media, and more. Start a conversation from the Tweet box, follow users that you discover, and reply to, retweet, or favorite Tweets directly from the page,” product manager Brian Ellin wrote.
Several websites have already embedded a timeline, including the homepage of ESPN Tennis, the website for London Fashion Week and the writer Margaret Atwood’s personal page.
“These new embeddable timelines enable publishers, writers, developers, and any Twitter user to drop a rich, interactive piece of Twitter into their websites,” Ellin says.
You can learn how to embed a Twitter timeline here.
Twitter moves
This is not a surprising move from Twitter, as they have recently been developing tools to enhance the Twitter experience.
Back in June, when Twitter abruptly stopped allowing Tweets to appear on LinkedIn, a blog post from Michael Sippey, director of consumer products at Twitter, said that Twitter would be focused on “building tools that make it easy for developers to build common Twitter features into their own sites in a simple and consistent way.”
“We’re building tools for publishers and investing more and more in our own apps to ensure that you have a great experience everywhere you experience Twitter, no matter what device you’re using.”
These tools include Twheel, which organizes Tweets into a wheel shape, and Twitter Cards, which allow users to attach “cards” to their tweets that will display content such as headlines, photos, and articles from around the web. The Twitter Timeline is just the latest tool that the company is debuting.
In order to promote its own tools, Twitter has been cracking down on third party developers with its new API guidelines.
According to the new guidelines, applications that have more than at least 100,000 users will have to work directly with Twitter on their product, policies and service agreement. Those that already have more than 100,000 user can only grow to 200% of their current size before they will contact Twitter.
If a user signed into an app with more than one account, that would count as multiple tokens. And getting one of those tokens back has become more difficult. User tokens do not expire and can only be revoked by the user by going to their Twitter settings.
These new guidelines have already caused problems with developers such as Tapbots, creator of the popular Tweetbot app. The company recently pulled the alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac due to the new restrictions.
