The pull quote is a time-honored way of both luring readers in with an enticing statement and taking up lots of room on a page with words you already wrote. But they're static, and they don't provide any extra information or insight. Twitter posts have been used as a sort of new-age pull quote before; they're about the right length, and can provide some extra insight too. But there hasn't yet been a particularly good way of integrating tweets into an article. Most writers will just take a screenshot of a tweet and post the image in--not dynamic, and a bit stiff.
Twitter gets it, and they're about to introduce a new Twitter-like pull quote called Embedded Tweets. According to Silicon Alley Insider, they'll have live links and text can be selected (unlike in a simple screenshot grab). Twitter says it'll consist of "just a snippet of code," probably a bit of HTML with room for the URL of the tweet you want to embed. They even demonstrate it here-
http://media.twitter.com/291/ash-cloud
-you can see that most of the links (though not hashtags) are live, meaning they can be clicked. The image at the top of this post? A screengrab. Just goes to show how good an idea this is--I need it literally in the post announcing it.
We'll see more information tomorrow, letting us know exactly how it works and how customizable it is. Will it cycle through related tweets, or stay on one? Can you pick a keyword? A news story? A hashtag? I know it'll be hard, since this is pretty much like Christmas Eve, but try to get some sleep tonight. There'll be embedded Twitter presents tomorrow.
