In a new blog post titled Tweets are the new quotes, Twitter Media directs readers’ attention to the increased use of tweets in news articles on the Web and says an alternative to current methods of quoting tweeters is coming tomorrow.
As of now, one either has to simply quote the tweet, which seems sort of reductive and can lead us to forget the original source of the message, or take a screenshot of the tweet, an unnecessarily large expenditure of time. On one hand, simply quoting the text is quicker, but on the other hand, screenshots are aesthetically more effective. There’s really no middle ground.
But there will be. Sometime tomorrow Twitter will be launching a nifty tool that lets anyone create embedded tweets that both look good and allow the text to function just like text:
“The alternative is super-simple,” explains Robin Sloan, responsible for Media Partnerships at Twitter. “[It’s] 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).”
It only makes sense to make tweets embeddable. Even more than images or videos, tweets are bite-size chunks of content that have no place remaining tied down to one spot of the Web.
Click here to see what the new feature will look like.
