Slug: embedded-tweets-arent-relax Date: 2010-05-04 Title: “"Embedded" tweets, aren’t. Relax.” layout: post

Shea Bennet posts a hyperventilating critique of Twitter’s new marketing tool to let you embed a tweet in your site: Blackbird Pie:

Prediction: embeddable tweets will soon be like all those YouTube videos that promise so much, only to serve up a no longer available error message as soon as you click play. Only this time without the promise part just a blank, empty void that mirrors your level of satisfaction.

Unlike what most of us nerds think of as embedding (<embed> and its ilk) Twitter is merely generating all the css to make the pasted code render exactly as it does on the Twitter web site. Witness:

View the source: The only “fragile” hrefs in that code (i.e., not on your site) are the user’s background image and profile picture. So, yeah, I suppose those might disappear at some point, but a “just a blank, empty void that mirrors your level of satisfaction”? Come on.