Using the Embed Tweets Feature in the New Twitter Interface

In the newly introduced (Thursday, Dec. 8th, 2011) online interface for Twitter, there an interesting feature that facilitates easier embedding of tweets into other online websites and blogs. The idea is pretty similar to embedding YouTube videos through HTML snippets that can be copied and pasted into a third-party website.

 I had to initially look around for the embed options... they're somewhat buried in the interface.


Here's a quick How-To Tutorial


1. “Open” a Tweet:

• Mouse-Over Tweet 
• You can click the Tweet text or click the “Open” link that appears when you mouse-over the tweet.

2. Get Tweet “Details”:

• After opening the tweet, click on “Details”

3. Get to Tweet “Embed” options:

• In the Detail view, click on “Embed this Tweet”

4. Select “Embed” options:

• Select embed option: HTML , Shortcode or Link
• Select alignment option for HTML or Shortcode embedding.
• Copy the HTML snippet or Shortcode or Link: Your choice should be based on what works on your blog or website platform. HTML Snippets will probably work on most sites. Tweet Shortcodes are currently only compatible with a few select web platforms such as Wordpress.

5. Paste the HTML snippet or shortcode to the blog or website:

• Here's how the HTML snippet from the example above renders on my blog:
  

just got access to the new twitter interface. need to find my regular controls but looks cool overall. — Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) December9, 2011

• I can improve the look-and-feel by including my desired style formatting... such as adding a blue border - ooooh! :-)

just got access to the new twitter interface. need to find my regular controls but looks cool overall. — Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) December9, 2011

That's it... easy peasy :-)

Academic Use Cases for Social Media

Note: The slides for my talk are available here (PDF format with annotations). To view the annotations, you'll need to download the file to your computer (your browser PDF plugin may not render the comment annotations).

I recently gave a talk on the use of social media in academia. Most of the audience comprised colleagues from various faculties across the University of Ottawa and their extent of use of various social media applications varied considerably (I conducted a quick online survey a couple of days before the day of the talk). While I had a few colleagues who were very well-versed in the use of social media in various settings such as classroom communication and course delivery, others had never even used Twitter. This, of course, made my task as a presenter a little more difficult to be able to cater to all skill levels, but I was kind of expecting this to begin with.

Note: I have an earlier blog post on Twitter Basics which may be of use to some of you who're just getting started with Twitter.

I had structured my presentation around the use-cases for social media in an academic context, primarily drawing upon my own experience as well as what I’ve seen through other colleagues. I figured this would be a much better approach to talk about social media rather than to give a demonstration of different tools individually. I think it worked well overall, and many colleagues provided positive feedback on the talk through email as well as in-person.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the presentation.



Five Primary Use Cases


I listed the main use cases of social media as pertaining to one of five areas described below:

1. Monitor Conversations & Content:

This is, by far, my personal most common use case for social media. I use Twitter and Google+ to keep track of news, events, activities, and publications relevant to my areas of research. While talking about this use case, I touched upon tools such as Google Alerts and TweetDeck that can streamline the monitoring process through customized content feeds and activity streams.

2. Generate Content: 

In this use case, I talked about the potential of blogging and microblogging, and also described the various ways that we as academics can provide value-added content through chiming in with ongoing conversations and curating interesting and relevant content for our online associates.

While the applications in this use case pertained to the use of standard content generation tools like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, we had a good discussion about the significance of content curation within the user-generated content paradigm.


3. Share Information:

Continuing with the theme of content curation, I also demonstrated my use of social bookmarking and collaborative tagging tools such as Diigo, and also highlighted the use of twitter based curation tools such as paper.li and storify.


4. Connect & Interact with Others:

I didn’t really need to say much about this use case since my audience survey before the talk had indicated this to be the most common use-case for social media for my colleagues. Whether it is interacting with colleagues through LinkedIn, or keeping in touch with family and friends through Facebook, most people get started with social media for networking and relationship management.

I did, however, mention the importance of establishing and participating in communities of interest and communities of practice through the use of tools such as LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Sparks and Google+ Hangouts. There are numerous opportunities in academic settings where these tools ican prove to be very beneficial.

5. Manage Profile & Identity: 

I deliberately positioned this as the last use case in my discussion to build upon the idea of profile, identity, and reputation online. With a relatively straight-forward recipe for managing profiles through LinkedIn and Google Profile, it’s somewhat more difficult to conceptualize identity and reputation. I attempted to explain this difference through some basic definitions. Also, this is where I drew upon my own research on member participation in online communities and I briefly highlighted the components that lead to building interpersonal trust in an online setting.

The discussion on identities and reputations also lent itself to our discussion about social media influence scoring tools, and I briefly highlighted the main features, and pros and cons of tools such as Klout, PeerIndex, and TweetLevel. A special mention went to Connect.me that I had only started using recently and was finding very useful.




Multiple Use Case Contexts & Special Mentions

In addition to the use-cases identified above, and the various tools that exemplified them, I also talked about a couple of my favorite tools that span multiple use-cases.






I shared my use of Yammer as the primary course delivery platform for two of my courses. I shared my opinion about Yammer as a social learning platform and compared it to other platforms that I’ve used previously – including blogs, wikis, LMS platforms etc.  Perhaps, I’ll do a separate blog post reflecting on my experience with Yammer as a social learning platform.












I also spoke about the usefulness of Mendeley as a cross between a reference management tool and a social network that fosters collaboration among researchers working in a research areas or those working on specific projects. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this tool and I’m thinking about writing a blog post on how I’ve started using Mendeley & Google Cloud Connect to help me with collaborative writing projects.


So that’s about it for a summary of my talk. Thanks to everyone who attended, and those who encouraged and waited for me to post this summary online. The annotated slides for my talk are available here.Please feel free to provide additional comments and feedback.

Some Twitter Tips to Get you Started

Over the past three months, I’ve started using Twitter a little more regularly than I used to. It’s grown on me and I’ve figured out the use-cases that fit my objectives as an academic. While upping the frequency of my tweets, I’ve also developed some familiarity with the conventions and terminology used on twitter.

In this post, I’m summarizing these conventions and terminology. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these tips useful.

What is Twitter?:

As a user, you will probably ascribe specific characteristics to Twitter based on what you use it for. Here are a couple of ways I think of Twitter:

• Twitter is a social networking platform that provides a microblogging service to its users. It allows users to post status updates called “Tweets” that are limited to 140 characters (including spaces and special characters).
  
  
• While many people would compare its functionality to that of a chat client, Twitter offers an open forum for many-to-many conversations.
  
  
• In addition to public messages, Twitter facilitates private communication among members (through direct messages)

·         For passive users, Twitter is a great monitoring tool to observe conversations among groups and posts regarding specific subjects.

Twitter Interface Basics:

Although Twitter can be used directly through its website interface (www.twitter.com), many people prefer using different clients to Twitter.com. My own favorite is TweetDeck (www.TweetDeck.com) which I use to monitor others tweets as well as to send my own updates.

• Your Twitter “Activity Stream” consists of you own tweets as well as tweets from others who you “Follow”. By following a user on twitter, you are adding that user’s tweets in chronological order to your timeline or activity stream. Following others is useful if you’re interested in the content and updates provided by them, and it’s also a recommended practice to foster reciprocity.
  
  
• It is also important to remember that tweets are public by default unless you restrict messages to specific recipients by including their usernames at the beginning of the tweets.

Essential Tweet Conventions:

Once you start tweeting beyond the basic / simple babble, you’ll start to realize the need for using direct reference to people, websites, and themes. These items constitute the three types of references you can include in your tweets:

• You can provide links to websites: While you can include the full URL of websites (http://...), you should get into the habit of shortening the URL. There are various URL shortening services available. My favorite is bit.ly (http://bit.ly).
  
  
• You can refer to other people of Twitter through a “Mention” by prepending the “@” symbol to their usernames. These mentions typically get reported to the person through an email or an alert within their activity stream.
  
  
• You can highlight specific keywords in your tweets by using the right “Hashtags”. A hashtag is a keyword with a “#” symbol prefixed to it. By utilizing relevant hashtags in your tweets, you can increase the searchability of your tweets by others. The key is to figure out hashtags that are used by others who talk about similar topics and utilize them within your own tweets if and where possible.

In addition to writing your own tweets, from time to time, you might feel the need to “Retweet” someone. By repeating a tweet from another user, you are amplifying their message and distributing it to your own followers. Again, this is a recommended practice to reinforce ties on your social network.  Remember that retweeting someone will make the original tweet appear in the activity stream of those who follow you on Twitter.

• You can retweet a message by clicking on the retweet symbol underneath that message. This is referred to as an automatic retweet.
  
  
• You can also retweet a person by copying the text of that tweet and prepending “RT @username” to identify that it’s a retweet from a specific username. This is referred to as a manual retweet.

Using Twitter as a Monitoring Tool:

• You can optimize your use of Twitter by creating “Lists” of different people you follow. For example, I have a list for my work-colleagues, and multiple lists that include professionals who talk about specific topics and subjects. This feature provides me with the capability to demarcate different social circles and communities of interest that I participate in. In the online Twitter interface, you can click use the drop-down menu underneath a person’s profile description to add them to a list (as shown below).
  
  If you use a client such as TweetDeck, you can display activity streams for your lists in different columns (I find this very useful for monitoring tweets).

• If you wish you use Twitter as a monitoring tool, you can save your searches and access them with greater ease at any time. Through the online Twitter interface, you can perform a keyword search using the search bar on the top of the screen, and click on the “Save this search” button.

This will make this search accessible to you through the “Searches” tab in your Twitter interface. Remember that the search results constitute an activity stream that will be updated as more relevant tweets keep getting posted.

• You can also mark tweets as “Favorites”. This is pretty similar to bookmarking important resources online. By creating your own list of favorites, you are really creating a catalog of tweets that you might want to come back to. The original tweeters receive a notification when you favorite one of their tweets.

Optimizing your Personal Interactions through Tweets:

You’ll probably get familiar with many customs and conventions of tweeting through your use of twitter, but here are a couple of tips to help you use the proper abbreviations and accepted vernacular.

• Use “via” to mention someone who pointed out something on Twitter. For example: “Here is a really great website http://shortURL via @username”
  
  
• Use “MT” to indicate a “modified retweet” when you are selectively quoting from a previous tweet. For example: “MT @informatician …”. While it is acceptable to use MT, it is good practice to ensure that you’re not changing the overall message.
  
  
•  Use a mention at the beginning of a tweet to direct that tweet to a specific person. For example: “@username hello how’s it going?” Referred to as conversational tweets, these messages will only be seen by accounts that follow BOTH your account AND the account you mentioned at beginning of tweet. Remember that if a mention is used elsewhere in your tweet, that tweet will be visible to all your followers.
  
  
• A variant of a conversational tweet is when you want to direct a tweet primarily to a specific person but also want your followers to see it. In such a case, you can prepend a period “.” before the mention. For example “. @username check this out: …”
  
  
• Use “cc” followed by a mention “@username” at the end of a tweet to get the attention of a specific person for whom that tweet may be relevant.
  
  
• While the above tips may be handy for interacting with others through Twitter, remember that you shouldn’t needlessly mention people in your tweets as this is considered a form of spam.

I think that’s about it in terms of a quick and light introduction to the use of Twitter. Like I said, you’ll probably figure out a lot more stuff on your own as you start using Twitter. These are just some tips that I hope you’ll find useful in getting started. Let me know what you think.

Happy Tweeting, and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@Informatician). I’ll certainly reciprocate.