From tomorrow you can display messages from Twitter on your blog or website without having to save the image, edit it, upload it, and then manually add a link.
So rather than all of that, from May 4th, you’ll be able to grab some HTML code which you can then embed without any image editing.
Handy for bloggers, and hinting that more tools for sharing and curating rivers of tweets will be on the way soon. In some ways it’s quite surprising, considering Glam had monetised a curated Twitter feed back in February 2009. Suddenly you don’t need to be an insightful content creator or a developer to do something quite interesting – a new group of curators could now come to the fore to make sense of the streams of information flowing through in realtime. And although mainstream news organisations will undoubtedly give it a try, that’s also got to open up the options for more specialised and niche publications, or niche experts in subjects which journalists don’t always do a great job of covering.
Of course, it also guarantees that every embedded link will carry a (presumably followed by Google) link to boost Twitter’s search ranking for whatever terms are including in it, and it also gives Twitter another platform which is could use to push out advertising or other monetisation attempts.
Presumably it also will mean that tweets can be wiped out at the source – if a tweet was deleted until now, all the embedded screenshot images will remain. If everyone starts using HTML embeds and tweets are removed, all the evidence goes with them.