Twitter have just released a raft of updates including a new interface for twitter.com and their iPhone application.

However, the new ability to embed tweets is of the most interest to website owners.

Twitter now provides the ability to embed a tweet into a website, in much the same-way you would embed a YouTube Video.

That TWITTER felt the NEED to make a 140 character SERVICE SIMPLER says VOLUMES about the mental INFERIORITY of your SPECIES. #NewTwitter

— THE SUPREME DALEK (@ASupremeDalek) December8, 2011

This is of interest to website owners for a number of reasons:

• You can much closer integrate your website and twitter feed.
• Users can favourite, retweet or reply directly from your site.
• Others can take your tweets and embed them into their sites, so increasing the reach of those tweets.

It is the first two points that excite me the most. At the moment the website and social media channels of many organisations are not particularly well joined up. Anything that creates a closer relationship between the two is in my opinion a good thing.

How to embed a tweet

Embedding a tweet could not be easier. Simply go to the link for a specific tweet and find the embed link.

This will display the following popup window where you cut and paste the appropriate code.

What I particularly like is that the embed code contains a semantically marked up version of the tweet in case the Javascript doesn’t load. Nice touch.