GitHub now supports Twitter Cards | Hacker News Reader

GitHub now supports Twitter Cards

github.com

79 pointsremi18 comments

It's a shame that Twitter decided to roll their own solution to this problem instead of using schema.org or other existing semantic markup. I'd be interested in knowing what didn't work for them about the existing standards.

FWIW, they do support some Open Graph markup as a fallback [0]

[0] https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards (last headline, no anchors...)

FYI, element IDs work as anchors.

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards#open-graph

    >I'd be interested in knowing what didn't work for them about the existing standards.

Probably their lack of control of it.

Agreed. oEmbed (http://oembed.com/) would make cards work with any service that wants to provide a "card".

Maybe I'm missing something, but do people actually see Twitter Cards in general? I mean, how many regular Twitter users actually use the web interface to interact with Twitter?

I don't know anyone that doesn't use a third-party client. And, given Twitter's clear desire to restrict 3rd party client API access, in order to get more eyeballs on more easily monetizable web-pages, Twitter Cards are never going to be seen by many users.

Yes, a lot of people do use the Twitter web interface. An I would imagine that number will only go up as Twitter keeps adding features to it while also squeezing third party apps.

Not to mention abandoning some of the official desktop apps. Twitter for Mac is abandonware at this point.

I see card data in the native Android Twitter app.

Purely anecdotal, but the web interface is probably my most frequent means of interacting with Twitter. It does what it needs to do for me.

Oh, I do. I love getting a little bit of extra info and context before clicking on a URL. And as someone posted before, it also works really well in the Twitter Android client.

I've never used any client other than the web interface.

Interestingly enough, my participation on Twitter was spurred and continually maintained via OSS and GitHub. So this is really welcome on my end (although I wouldn't mind extra info such as watchers and forks).

It is a bit weird though: the displayed image is the project owner's profile image, which doesn't seem directly relevant, and seems a bit out of place.

Yeah, the message to create an account is probably unnecessary more than half the time people will be reading these.

What's GitHub up to? They've been releasing cool features more frequently this week it seems. Was this part of the plan? Developers decided to finish their tasks almost at the same time? What are we going to see tomorrow? It's exciting. :) Features please!

Although I have to say I like schema.org, now we have:

- oEmbed

- Facebook OpenGraph

- schema.org

- Twitter Cards

WTF.

Is there an example of this working somewhere?

Any tweet with a Github link shows a card when viewed through the web interface. Here's one of mine: https://twitter.com/dpearson_/status/288415765223321600

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