If there's anything Twitter wants, it's for you to see more tweets—whether you use Twitter or not.
To get tweets in front of people anywhere on the Internet, the company has long relied on the "embedded tweet," a snippet of code that displays an individual tweet on a web page. Starting next week, Twitter is giving embedded tweets an upgrade: instead of a single tweet, you'll be able to include the whole stream.
These updated embeddable timelines, similar to what Storify has long offered, will include tweets themselves as well as any media associated with those tweets, including photos, videos, and polls. Twitter says profiles and lists will also be embeddable.
"This update is more than a facelift," writes Mollie Vandor, a senior product manager at Twitter, in a blog post today. Twitter first announced a kind of embeddable tweet grid in the fall. This is a more streamlined version of that grid developed based on feedback from publishers—that is, the makers of sites that draw the big audiences Twitter hopes to reach.
"More than one billion visitors to our developers’ sites and apps already see these embedded Tweets every month," Twitter said in a recent shareholder's letter. "We believe that these sites and apps are incredibly important amplifiers that show the huge reach and importance of tweets."
After all, imagine how many people have read Kanye's (numerous) Twitter meltdowns on a news site instead of Twitter itself. Or how many people smirked about jokes about Burger King's new hot dogs, or winced at critiques about #OscarsSoWhite—all via tweets embedded in other places on the web. Twitter wants to make sure that that pattern continues, and offering prettier, more streamlined ways to embed lots of tweets (whole streams of them!) helps make that prospect easier and more palatable to publishers.
One problem with this plan is that few publishers embedding tweets are going to want to embed ads. So Twitter won't make money directly by reaching those extra eyeballs. But as the company's stock flails below its IPO price due to slow user growth, Twitter is looking to make its appeal as broad as possible. See enough tweets in other places, and maybe you'll end up going to Twitter to see for yourself.
