Twitter Publish: Twitter’s New Tool For Embedding Tweets

Tired of your embedded tweets feeling text-heavy and displaying in a one-after-another fashion?

Meet Embedded Grid, Twitter’s new way to give a series of tweets a much more visual look.

The new feature, introduced today at Twitter’s Flight developers conference in San Francisco, is part of Twitter Publish, a new, free tool to help people create better-looking embedded stories from the raw materials of Twitter.

Twitter is already using the tool internally, combined with others like its Curator product, to create stories for Moments, the immersive storytelling feature the company launched last month. Now, Twitter is giving more access to the public at publish.twitter.com.

Here’s how it works. Any Twitter collection — or series of tweets — that you create using Twitter tools like TweetDeck or Curator can be plugged into publish.twitter.com, which in turn will generate code to embed on a website or a mobile app. Any updates to the collection will automatically flow into the embedded story.

Here’s how an Embedded Grid looks:

A Collection on Twitter

Embedded Grids are responsive but currently only display on the Web; on mobile apps, tweets in collections appear one after another, but that likely will change in the future. We’d assume that these stories will eventually look more like Moments on mobile.

“We have big plans for this new tool,” senior product manager Mollie Vandor wrote in a blog post. “We want it to be a one stop shop where you can easily preview all of the different types of displays we offer in Twitter Kit and grab the embed code for any Twitter content you’d like to publish.”

To make the process work, Twitter has created a Collections API and is working with partners Spredfast, Dataminr, ScribbleLive, Wayin and Flowics to incorporate the API in their third-party tools.