Twitter has been called the world’s newsroom. It’s often the first place reports of natural disasters become the public knowledge, and offers an efficient way to survey opinions–and get reliablequotes–from a variety of sources quickly.
Sometime Tuesday, Twitter is expected to make tweets embeddable, so that writers can include a tweet in their online posts with a bit html code. This eliminated the need to copy and paste the text. If you’re underwhelmed by the magnitude of this development, you are not alone.
“What’s the opposite of mind blowing? http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hints-at-embed-this-tweet-feature-coming-tomorrow-2010-5? /jm,” asks FutureTenseAPM early Tuesday morning.
Embedding his tweet took about 25 seconds.
True, there is valuable metadata lost when simply embedding the tweet, like the precise time and, for the obsessive compulsive reader, what client FutureTenseAPM used. It also is not 100% guaranteed that a blogger got the tweet right with the copy-paste method.
Embeddable Tweets, will, as thespiralquirk points out, ensure reporters don’t distort a source’s meaning with strategic selection.
Of course, accuracy can also be guaranteed using the alternative method to quoting tweets, the screenshot. The screenshot also includes all the metadata visible on a tweet and takes all of about 40 seconds for a blogger to capture and upload. Is a feature that saves some portion of 40 seconds really worth Twitter’s development time? If you still don’t understand this…
… consider that the screenshot does not include live links, and detail-oriented writers are forced to copy and include a hyperlink back to the original tweet for the curious reader–an oft-neglected move.
Twitter is also wise to make it as easy as possible for reporters to use the service, since it will give Twitter more inventory to sell as it begins to incorporate advertising. So far, the company has announced it will display “promoted tweets” from paying advertisers in Twitter search results, but it’s likely that embedded tweets could at some point include very small ads, in the form of a single keyword with a hyperlink, for instance. Now does this make sense?
