Embeddable Tweets Likely to Create Signals for Twitter Search

Twitter has been smooth-talking the media community and at 5.55 PM San Francisco time yesterday, the company made an announcement on its blog for media that should please content curators. Twitter promises to officially allow the embedding of tweets on blogs and other online media.

Seduction
Embedding means that what lots of us have been doing will now become easier, namely pasting screenshots of tweets into blog posts and articles to use as story leads or points of view.

Twitter contends this move will enhance the quality of media content by ensuring that quotes are absolutely accurate. Also, the chirpy company underlined that “a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack”. So the nice people at Twitter are making quoting tweets easier by offering a “a snippet of code” for every tweet.

So instead of this:

It’ll be something like this:

UPDATE: It actually looks like this.*

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/19805914/the-matrix.jpg) #9AE4E8;padding:20px;}p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px}p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

Editor’s note: We had to pick something and this tweet raised a smile

Cunning Plan
Twitter is starting to know a thing or two about search:

• This new code should enable Twitter to see what sites embed and aggregate tweets. Studying this data could allow for others to understand how this information is used by Google/Twitter. Sites, in turn, will be able to use this to their advantage in their HTML markup: if you embed tweets, are you more likely to be shown? If your tweets are embedded by someone else, are they more likely to rank higher?

 

• Also Twitter could use embedding tweets as part of its algorithm for “promoted tweets”: measuring retweets and followings is one thing, but further down the road, embeds may also show importance and/or relevance — e.g. websites become meta data on tweets.

 

• However, it is very difficult to gauge how Twitter will use any info as “promoted tweets” while they are rolling out their new ad platform.

 

• What’s certain though, is that embedded Tweets will be able to be indexed by search engines as they will be in text as opposed to previously “unreadable” images.

 

• Stemming directly from that, the great advantage for search marketing is that tweets come with a bonus as they each reflect one person’s behaviors. Statistics and personalized data collected via geotagging apps for example can all be taken into account directly in algorithms. Embedded Tweets will mean precious personal data delivered directly to marketers’ doors.

 

Worried about your privacy? That’s another story, altogether. We hope Twitter also provides a tool to allow you to trackback to any of your tweets that have been embedded.

UPDATE: The embedding tool is called Blackbird Pie and available to use right now.

*Updates added to this post at 18:04 EST.