Twitter has just announced that users can now embed a new Twitter timeline on their sites.
OLD:
NEW:
Overall the new embedded Twitter timeline is a nice upgrade. Very interactive. Very sleek. Very intuitive from a site visitor perspective. Also the way that the new timeline display rich media (pictures and videos) inside the new timeline is very sleek – if you are checking out this post around the time am publishing it, if you scroll down inside the new timeline you’ll see a photo of my “Monster Jacks” that I was frying up for my kids on Monday.
At this point I’d say the main thing lacking with the new version is the design customization options. I suspect that Twitter is purposefully limiting these options (right now you can use “light” or “dark” and you can set your link colors) likely either because it is so new or maybe they are trying to establish some element of uniformity for the embedded Twitter timelines moving forward (kind of like Facebook with their Like Boxes.
In any event I am leaning very much toward the new box and will likely be putting it in my blog’s sidebar soon enough (actually it is already there, just toward the bottom).
Twitter also just announced that they are enabling what they call Twitter cards – while I’m not going to review this feature it does look pretty cool but this one is a little more in depth before you go diving in. Looks like Twitter is creating continuing to focus on ways to expand 140 characters with added context.