How to: embed tweets on your website or blog

Twitter has had a busy past three months, launching a redesign, an open-source Android security tech, and Tweetdeck as a Web application. Now it's offering a way to make your website or blog more interactive with easy-to-embed tweets using just one line of code or a link to add.

This new method will let your visitors to your website interact with embedded tweets, and view details such as replies and retweets. This can improve your website while requiring a minimal amount of coding. Here's how to how to embed the new code and get started.
Embedded Tweets

When viewing one of the new embedded tweets you'll have to click on the date/time stamp in the lower left corner of that module to get information on the tweet, and you'll need to have access to the redesign of Twitter to see favorites, retweets and replies. Otherwise, you'll just get the usual permalink.

One really cool feature is that any tweets with a photo will embed that photo within any text in the tweet. The catch: The tweet that you're embedding needs to have the picture uploaded to pic.twitter.com in order to show up in an embedded tweet. Photos uploaded to any other service won't work. If you want to make your photo tweets easier to share in light of this, you may want to start uploading your pictures to Twitter's own service.


First, the new twitter

Icons for Home, Connect, and Discover should be at the top left of your profile if you have the new design. If your account isn't yet active on the new Twitter design, you won't be able to get the code to embed tweets. If your Twitter profile doesn't have the features announced here, you're not on the new design yet. If you've downloaded the new version for Android or iPhone, you'll get earlier access to the new Twitter when logging in on your PC's browser. A Twitter representative confirmed that the new version of Twitter.com is still in progress.



Get the embed code and find the permalink

If your account already appears with the new Twitter design, then you're in business. To get the embed code, you'll have to go to your tweet's permalink page. There is no obvious spot on a tweet, even in the new redesign, to get your permalink. Instead, the permalink is hidden within the timestamp on the tweet. Click the timestamp - the time or date at the top right of any single tweet - to open the tweet, then click on "details" to open the permalink page (seen below, with a picture included).




A permalink contains one singgle tweet only. From your tweet's permalink page, click on "Embed This Tweet". Copy and paste the code you're given into your website or blog where you want the tweet to show up, and that's it. Our example below uses the HTML code pasted into a Tumblr post.



Embeddable tweets make your content permanent

Now, more than ever, you'll need to think before you tweet. While people can still take a screenshot of your incriminating tweet (ahem, Kenneth Cole?) and post it to a website, now they have the option of embedding tweets as well. Deleting a tweet does not make the content of the tweet go away if it's been embedded in a website or blog. If your business has been posting tweets live without any vetting process, you may want to change your habits. Although a screenshot takes extra effort to create, an embedded tweet could now easily end up anywhere on the Web.