Have you ever tried to quote a Twitter post on your blog? The easiest way to do it is to just copy and paste the text into a blockquote and move on. However, it doesn’t look as good as if you take a screenshot of the permalink page, which is a little bit more time consuming. (It also has the disadvantage of being an image rather than plain text, which has usability and SEO implications.)
Twitter may have the answer. A new post on their Twitter Media blog mentions the possibility of embeddable plain-HTML tweets that you could put in your blog posts.
Oddly enough, I had thought of a similar idea when I was planning my Tweetable plugin. I’d thought it would be neat to have a shortcode that could be used to pull a tweet via the API and style it in the post. You would put something like [twquote]13300180803[/twquote] in your post, and it would be replaced with the text of the message and the username/avatar. I decided not to include it in the first release, and I never really got around to implementing it later. It’s nice to see that Twitter is working on something similar.
Tweets are the new quotes [Twitter Media]
Edit: An early form of the tool, called “Blackbird Pie” is now available for use. It still has some rough edges, like a monstrously large mess of inline HTML elements for an embed code, but it should work fine.
