#twitter embeds

@dioti

I’m going to try your suggestions, if I have trouble I may reach out for more detailed help.

Twitter embeds have been around for a couple of years. The social network keeps improving them, and every major blogging platform now supports them natively … except for Tumblr. Facebook embeds are here. Instagram and vine each have embeds which are designed to protect creator rights while plugging into the sharing nature of the internet. But they remain cumbersome to use at best on Tumblr because the "Video" embed is clearly not an "anything else" embed.

On WordPress, if I want to embed a tweet, I just put it on its own line, like this.

https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/statuses/366504923682185217

Tumblr doesn't do this. And it's starting to look comicly inept that they're ignoring this increasingly useful part of how social media works.

There's a product out there, called Embedly, which allows users to embed hundreds of types of content using a single line of javascript. Tumblr could add this line to its products, sign a contract, and boom, welcome to 2013! This could make things way easier for users and writers.

In fact, there's probably a reason to think that Tumblr could save itself a few bucks because all the extra bandwidth used by all the extra uploading and downloading of twitter screenshots could then be replaced with a single javascript file that is loaded on the user's end. They have millions of users. They could take a 50kb PNG file and replace it with a line of text less than 1 kilobyte in size, and because they have so many millions of users, the cost and engineering benefits conceivably would add up.

We posted something asking tumblr to consider adding these embeds almost two full years ago. Why is this still even an issue? Whose arm do we have to twist to convince them that this is a net positive?

To give you an idea of what they look like, here are a few DigitSlam tweets for you guys. 

212 years old — the collective age of New Kids on the Block, going on a boy-band oldies tour soon. sfbne.ws/WdM300

— DigitSlam (@DigitSlam) January 22, 2013

40 years ago today, the Supreme Court's 7-2 ruling on Roe V. Wade defined the abortion debate. sfbne.ws/WEQvCO

— DigitSlam (@DigitSlam) January 22, 2013

50 times as much wireless traffic is expected by 2016. Please save a chunk of spectrum for me. onforb.es/V1XzYU

— DigitSlam (@DigitSlam) January 22, 2013