Twitter Display Guidelines | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Display Guidelines

dev.twitter.com

33 pointsremi22 comments

It's ironic to me that on a page discussing display guidelines, the numbers inside of the red circles overlaying the screenshot are not x/y centered. It's annoying me, I want to fix it :(

Anyhoot, on the topic, it would be nice if Twitter would give you a special .png image that's generated on the fly or something by the server, for a tweet. Like embedding a youtube video, but simpler. Like add .png to the basic tweet_detail URL to get an image of it.

Example: http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448 Could be: http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448.png

Of coures this presents a whole new can of worms for the Twitter team... but it would be nice :) There might even be a way to do it where you can't hotlink it, but you can download the file and host it yourself.

A real life example of this occurs when hitting up speedtest.net. Once you're finished, you're given a simple link to share on forums, with friends, etc.. to a generated image of your results. (http://www.speedtest.net/result/822174957.png)

I actually did this for the purpose of pasting tweets in Campfire chats - http://jazzychad.com/twitter/14450770448.png

php + gd + mod_rewrite. super simple.

Thats awesome! Now all you need to do is get it to conform to their guidelines :D

I did it back when I was working remotely with the Twitter API team. They didn't seem to mind :)

this is a really great idea

Why turn linkable, copy pasteable, screen readable HTML into an inscrutible image? Maybe they could make embedding simpler, but I think there are betterr options than turning it into an image.

http://twictur.es/ started doing this ages ago. I use Propane (http://propaneapp.com) and before 37s added styled tweets it used to automatically generate them.

I'd love to see twitter support this natively. I know I saw a js version they made somewhere, but it was kinda broken (had static relative times, ages of js to copy and paste, etc)

Embeddable tweets do this? Not as straightforward, but: http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/

Ahh that's pretty elite too. Thanks for the link.

The title says "Guidelines" but the page itself calls them "REQUIREMENTS" and says you have to email Twitter for approval if you want to deviate from them.

If it's really their intention to enforce this on all Twitter API users, then I think it's a huge mistake.

Notice how point #3 says hashtags should be linked, but in their reference image the #TweetUp hashtag isn't linked.

I might be hypersensitive here, but my first thought is "is it time to jump ship"?

I refer to the "Branding" section - for the first time Twitter makes it clear who owns the Tweets in their opinion. And it is Twitter, not the users.

Bummer :-(

(Speaking as a developer of Twitter apps)

This has nothing to do with who owns the tweets. Rather it's an indication that Twitter want to make it easy for people to recognize a tweet across the web.

They determine how I am allowed to display the Tweet. That just plain sucks. For me it is a biggie.

If Twitter wouldn't own the Tweets, how could they make the rules for the way I am allowed to display them?

Perhaps as a condition of API usage?

So for example what Panic is doing [1] would not be ok and in need of approval? Twitter sure has some fascists working on their branding, I’m not really sure whether that’s good or bad, though.

[1] http://www.panic.com/blog/

I'm not exactly sure how this helps Twitter.

The one nit I've always had is whether third-party apps/sites link the @ symbol when attached to usernames. I prefer unlinked @ symbols (as seen on twitter.com site), but even so, search.twitter.com links the @ symbol... how consistent.

search.twitter.com is still a separate app all-together (purchased from I-don't-remember-whom). Twitter officially intends to roll it into the rest of their internal apps and API at some point. You're right, it is inconsistent, but at least there is some sort of excuse.

Well yes, I know. They acquired Summize well over a year ago, and it would probably be a one-line code change. It's probably not a high priority issue for them, but it still bothers me :)

This page was a very pleasant surprise find when they introduced dev.twitter.com at Chirp in April. I don't like that most Twitter clients reinvent the wheel in terms of UI. A little consistency and familiarity doesn't hurt.

So uh my little Chrome extension I made has to do all this shit? Uh fuck that, thank you very much. I'd rather just delete the extension. What a bunch of bullshit.

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