Update: See an example of the tool in action at the bottom of the post, courtesy of Twitter.
Twitter thinks that a tweet is the new quote. Have you ever been quoted by an article or report, and had your words mangled as they went from your mouth to publication?
Twitter wants to change that, and tomorrow will release a tool that will help with the embedding of tweets on individual websites to prevent misquotes.
The company was tickled with ReadWriteWeb’s coverage of the Palm and HP story recently, where the publication used images of tweets that had pithy responses to the corporate acquisition as the meat of the story itself. While taking images of individual tweets and incorporating them into blog posts is not new, it has always been in Twitter’s words, “a bit of a hack.”
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By building and releasing a tool Twitter will make it simpler and cleaner to embed tweets offsite, increasing the prevalence of the practice and giving it an aesthetic boost. As points of data, context, and accurate quotation the power of a tweet should not be underestimated.
Exactly what this tool will do, and how it will do it are still open questions. Louis Gray makes the point that if the tool is “customizable and elegant, like the company’s existing widgets,” it will be a very well received. Tomorrow we will bring you the new Twitter tool, with embedded tweets, of course.
Example:
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