Twitter to launch embeddable tweets

Twitter has surreptitiously announced the launch of embeddable tweets, allowing users to add a Twitter update to websites.

Although it hasn't been officially announced, Twitter did show off the brand-new function on its media blog.

The micro-blogging site is hoping that sites will use the embeddable option to show off how much of a viable news source Twitter has become.

To show off the virtues of adding tweets to a news piece it uses an article by ReadWriteWeb, which has screen-grabbed tweets in it, as an example, noting: "the use of real tweets helps 'chunk' the piece both visually and logically; we think it makes it easier to read."

Bit of a hack

The blog post then goes on to explain that: "The truth is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have a simple alternative to propose; it's coming tomorrow."

And to show off the technology, Twitter posted what an embeddable tweet will actually look like.

To make it work, Twitter notes that all that's needed is "just a snippet of code you'll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets."

There's no sign of the code yet, but if Twitter says it's arriving today then we can only but believe it.

UPDATE

Twitter has released its code generator for embeddable tweets in a quick post on its media blog.

To use it, go to http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie and enter the URL of the tweet you want to embed. To get the URL, simply click on the time stamp of the tweet.

The blog does note that it won't work on all sites, but this is very much a work in progress for the company.

Currently, the code you have to add to your blog is massive - this will be reduced in the next iteration and so will some time-stamping issues.

For now, you will just have to 'bake it' and hope the embed comes out okay.

Via Twitter Media blog and Mashable