WebProNews

Tag: Embeddable Timelines

  • Here’s What The Guy Who Wrote The Book On Twitter Thinks About Its Directory And Embeddable Timelines Widget

    Twitter has recently launched a user profile directory and an embeddable timelines widget. The two features are fairly unrelated, but since we had the opportunity to converse with Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao Of Twitter, we thought we’d pick his brain about them.

    The Twitter Profile Directory

    “It has been frustratingly difficult finding users on Twitter unless you know their precise handle — so any improvement will be welcomed!” Schaefer tells WebProNews. “I’ve tried this new directory and still find it buggy but presumably it will be a great help to discovering Twitter users.”

    “I think there is also a built-in benefit here to search engines,” he adds. “Twitter has made a number of search-friendly moves in the last few months and this is an example of this strategy. Of course, many Twitter profile pages have been indexed by the search engines for some time now, so it’s too early to say if the new directory is helping them find any unindexed profiles but my hunch is that is going to provide much more visibility to Twitter profiles on search.”

    In the book, he had some good things to say about Twellow, which is certainly a more user-friendly way to discover Twitter users based on category and/or location (disclosure: Twellow is owned by WPN parent company iEntry).

    The Embeddable Timelines Widget

    “I have a very strong opinion about that,” says Schaefer. “I think in most cases, it’s really ineffective to embed a Twitter stream on a website for two reasons. First, if you’re using Twitter correctly, you’re having a conversation right? Why would you post one side of a conversation on your website? What good is that? At that point it seems like a gimmick just to show you’re cool or something.”

    Embeddable Twitter Timeline

    “The second reason is the potential risk,” he adds. “I was on a friend’s site and he had his Twitter widget front and center on his company’s landing page. Well, his latest tweet was a joking comment about the foremost users of Twitter that simply said ‘PORNOGRAPHY!’ Is that really what he wanted on the front page of his website? The tweets are completely out of context.”

    “There could be some interesting applications to allow people to see tweets from a conference or something but again, a conference of any size is going to attract spammers to a popular hashtag,” he notes. “You run the risk of posting tweets that are inappropriate or even damaging.”

    For more of our conversation with Schaefer, see:

    Why Hasn’t Twitter Launched A TweetDeck-like Interface?

    Without Realtime Search, Google Risks Pushing News Seekers Away To Twitter

  • Google Buzz Is Still Part Of The Twitter Conversation

    I’m not going to lie. I kind of wanted an excuse to try out Twitter’s new embeddable timelines, but I couldn’t help but notice that there still seems to be an odd amount of mentions of Google Buzz going through Twitter even today, nearly a year after its official demise.

    Why are so many people tweeting about Google Buzz?


    I will also use this opportunity to point out some shortcomings of Twitter’s widget. There are actually a lot more tweets mentioning Google Buzz happening, but it’s not displaying them all in the widget. If you select “all” on a Twitter search for “google buzz,” you’ll see a fair amount more. I’d like to see Twitter give you the option to include “top” tweets or “all” tweets, as it does from the search itself.

    It does kind of put it into perspective just how much tweeting is going on these days. If I can easily find this many people talking about a product that has been dead for nearly a year, and isn’t in the news (other than perhaps a mention in regards to Google’s other privacy battles), there really must be an incredible amount of conversation (or at least textual input) happening on this social network/microblogging service.

    Furthermore, this re-emphasizes a point I’ve made in previous articles about why Google really needs to get that Twitter firehose back if it truly wants to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. It becomes obvious in searches for developing news stories, but this even shows that Google is lacking the current conversation about history.

    Something more significant than Google Buzz would surely illustrate this even better.

    But even in this case, I can clearly see that Google, despite its increased emphasis on freshness in search results of late, isn’t showing me the current conversation about Google Buzz in a search for “google buzz,” even with the appropriate search refinements. I’m not seeing updates like this in such a search:

  • Twitter Launches New Embeddable Timelines

    Twitter Launches New Embeddable Timelines

    Twitter launched embeddable tweets (though we’re partial to our own SocialDitto) late last year, but now they’re taking things a step further. The company is launching a new way to embed interactive timelines of tweets on any website.

    “Whether it’s an author’s Tweets alongside their blog, a hashtag about an event like #DNC2012, or a list of competitors at the US Open, Tweets add a live, real-time dimension to articles, news reports, and the web at large,” says product manager Brian Ellin in a blog post. “These new embeddable timelines enable publishers, writers, developers, and any Twitter user to drop a rich, interactive piece of Twitter into their websites.”

    Just as with embeddable tweets, users can interact with the embedded timelines just like they would be able to do on Twitter.com.

    Embeddable Twitter Timeline

    “Expand Tweets to see photos, media, and more,” says Ellin. “Start a conversation from the Tweet box, follow users that you discover, and reply to, retweet, or favorite Tweets directly from the page.”

    To add a timeline to your site, simply add a line of HTML to deliver ANY account’s tweets, favorites, lists, search queries or #hashtags.

    “These new tools are built specifically for the web: they load fast, scale with your traffic as your audience grows, update in real-time, and work great in modern, legacy, and mobile browsers,” says Twitter’s Sylvain Carle.

    To create an embeddable timeline, you can do so from this new timeline settings page. More information can be found in Twitter’s developer documentation.