Twitter introduces embeddable tweet-stream tool

Twitter today announced the launch of a real-time tool that allows Web site operators to embed interactive Twitter timelines on their Web pages.

"Today we're bringing Twitter and the Web closer together by launching new real-time tools for Web site developers," Twitter developer advocate Sylvain Carle wrote in a blog post today. "With our new embedded timelines, you can place any public timeline on your Web site, connecting your readers with the Tweets that you and others create on Twitter."

The way the tool works is that it lets users embed a stream of tweets … Read more

Using your head

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Google launches Boutiques.com for highfalutin shoppers

Google creates Hotspot to help you discover your friends' favorite haunts

Hulu Plus is now $2 per month cheaper and available on the Roku set-top box

Yahoo launches Amazon Studios goes live in a quest for the next big thing in movies

Yahoo Clues lets you track trending search topics

The Emergency Broadcast System is coming to your cell phone

Intel wants to put computer chips in football helmets to measure head trauma

A New York University professor is going to live-stream his life from a … Read more

YouTube testing hybrid HTML5/Flash embeds

Google has worked out a new way to embed videos that presents the right version of the company's YouTube video player depending on your system's capability.

Videos embedded with the new code will be served up in either an Adobe Flash wrapper, or in the company's HTML5 player, opening up viewing to a potentially broader audience and without any extra effort for the person who embedded a video in the first place.

According to the Google, the company plans to roll the new code format out as the new default for YouTube embeds, but is running it … Read more

Vimeo nixes HD embed play limits, side business




Viacom's departure from Hulu comes with a bite

Hulu on Tuesday announced on its blog that partner Viacom would be pulling its content from the service, and noted that shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" would only be available through the beginning of next week.

Though an inconvenience for Hulu users who had relied on the service's subscription tools and new episode notifications, Hulu noted that most of the content that's being pulled will still be available back on ComedyCentral.com.

But, as the Hollywood Reporter has discovered, it may not be such an easy transition for users and … Read more

Embedit.in hosts your documents in the cloud

New service Embedit.in is launching on Tuesday with a tool that lets users host documents up to 20MB in size. Like Scribd, DocStoc, and others, Embedit.in uses Adobe Flash to power a viewer that lets users flip and scroll through pages in long documents.

As the name suggests, documents can be embedded either as a thumbnail that opens up to an overlay of the document reader, or as an embedded player like what you see lower down on this story. In either case, the service doesn't take visitors off whatever site they're on to let them see the content, which is nice.

Along with items users have uploaded individually, Embedit.in can be installed in the source code on any site. This turns any outgoing URLs that link to compatible document files into hosted Embedit.in docs. Each time it discovers a newly-added item it simply downloads it in the background, then reassigns the link.

One area where Embedit.in differs from competing services is in letting users make small cosmetic changes to documents after they've been uploaded. To do this, it uses markup tools from parent company Increo's sister project, Backboard. This allows for simple things like highlighting, underlining, and circling. Missing, however, are some of the more advanced items like being able to add new chunks of text or images, or let users go in and make edits to the existing copy.

Embedit.in also has its own analytics dashboard for each document. This shows you how many views a document has, where viewers are from, how many times they've printed or downloaded a local copy, as well as a heat map of where user attention has been. It does this by tracking what parts of the document people have spent the most time on, and can be quite fun to look at if you've hosted something with images.

Embedit.in is very slick but misses some things I think are quite important. For one… Read more

Does AP know how its YouTube channel works?

Updated April 9 at 10:55 a.m. PDT with AP comment.

Maybe the Associated Press can file this one under "That's news to me."

At least one representative of the venerable news agency, which recently declared that it was tired of the Internet riding on its coattails, was apparently unaware the agency had an official YouTube video channel.

The AP recently sent a letter to WTNQ-FM in Tennessee--an affiliate of the Associated Press, by the way--accusing the country music radio station of copyright violation for embedding videos from the AP's official YouTube channel on its … Read more

YouTube tweaks its embedded video player

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three years you've watched a YouTube video off of YouTube.com. So many viewers watch videos this way (YouTube says it's 44 percent of viewership), the company has overhauled its player, making several of the site's latest features available off of YouTube's site.

The biggest change is the inclusion of annotations and closed captions, meaning if you're watching a video that has them added you'll see them as the video plays. This includes the latest translation feature too, so if you're watching … Read more

Flickr's missing feature solved with SlideFlickr

Been looking for a way to get a Flickr slide show on your blog or Facebook profile? Check out SlideFlickr, a dead simple tool for pulling in albums or photo streams in an embeddable slide show. Just drop in a Flickr username, or a URL for a group, photo set, or tag, and hit a big pink button. SlideFlickr will spit out some embed code you can plug into your blog, Web site, or social networking profile. If you're interested in a simpler solution, they've also got a Facebook application that lets you add your SlideFlickr slide shows … Read more

SplashCast gets a little more social, bird-like





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