Following up on an announcement on TwitterMedia yesterday called “Tweets are the new quotes”, I went to check out the new feature. Good news is that@robinsloan from Twitter posted a new “hack” (which you can see below) which allow anyone to embed Tweets as pretty visual quotes in HTML. The bad news is that Robin clarified that this wasn’t in any way a feature, but simply something he’d been thinking of himself and simply throwing out there to test out. I was disappointed.

Could’ve been a response to FB Like…

When I read the initial post (also posted by Mashable), I thought this was obviously a timely and necessary response to the Facebook Like and Open Graph update. Not that Twitter and Facebook directly compete in this way, but I thought it would be absolutely great to be able to easily incorporate embeddable snippets of conversation all over the web.

We all remember /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,flyer/date,2143-01-01/”>cialis prices the Skittles social network mashup used as a campaign platform recently. Well…. Imagine a similar approach, this time bringing tweets right to a website based on entering a Twitter search URL, exactly as the hack that was posted today asks you to enter a single tweet URL. The resulting embeddable box could be skinned by the requesting user, as the hack uses the twitter account’s style settings.

FB turned Connect into more usable features, so should Twitter

There really isn’t much that Facebook released last week that wasn’t mostly possible before, through the use of Facebook Connect or APIs. What Facebook has done is take it one huge step further by creating Social Plugins which were designed for immediate mass use (check!). They’ve also made it unbelievably easy to now integrate anything, any page, any app into the social graph.

Twitter too, can be integrated onto third party sites, where conversation can be embedded and even conducted right on these sites. But what if they also took it one step further with embeddable plugins that no longer require the OAuth Allow/Deny process via API, but rather incorporate Twitter conversation features straight on a third party site. Sounds like an equivalent strategy compared to the FB Social Plugins. And I do mean taking this one notch further than their current goodies and widgets. Much like Facebook likes attaches to sites, contents, items, products, tweets could potentially do the same. One example of this would be embeddable geo-conversation, think all the foursquare based tweets automatically queriable by location.

Of course, taking it one step further would mean opening up the Twitter graph and conversation to all. The effects of such a move could be groundbreaking. Much like Facebook a few years ago, Twitter guards its stream and data access carefully. This is probably a “monetization curve” strategy. They will surely do this as they acquire more mass and secure stable revenue streams. But we’ll take the plugins for now.

What you can use today.

In the meantime, checkout the Twitter widget Goodies, allowing you to embed conversation (yes, that’s always been possible!?) in portable widgets. See below for some examples.

Search Widget

Profile Widget