Twitter timelines can now be embedded onto any website

Steven Loeb · September 5, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/29f3

Twitter unveils yet another tool since crackdown on third-party apps

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.

Steven Loeb

All author posts

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Twitter

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on April 9, 2008

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.