In a short note on the less-visible Twitter Media site, Twitter praised ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick's (@marshallk) use of highlighting tweets as quotes to provide context, and said that these can be seen as providing perfect integrity for quotes, something missing in the world of redirects, spin and the proverbial misquotes. While it's no surprise that Twitter likes people highlighting Twitter, they suggest an alternative to the copy/paste approach to getting a tweet from their site to yours, and they promise it is coming tomorrow.They say: "the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow."
The art of copying and pasting tweets into stories is fairly commonplace. Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag practically does it every day. (See: Overheard: Facebook's CEO Hates Privacy from Thursday) With Twitter becoming the source for more information, an official solution, assuming it is customizable and elegant, like the company's existing widgets, will be welcome.
@robinsloan posts from @twittermedia about getting quotes right.
Of course, copying and pasting one's tweet and saving it as an image (as I did above) puts the power in the publisher's hands, and doesn't rely on a third party site, like Twitter, to host the content. It also keeps the tweet intact should it be deleted later by the source. Looking forward to what gets introduced tomorrow.