Anatomy of a tweet - the New New Twitter version

I wrote an 'anatomy of a tweet' post back in December 2009 but rather a lot has changed on Twitter since then with two major changes (known as #newtwitter and #newnewtwitter).

As always the tweet you see on screen has loads of hidden information and links to things within it and so here are some of them. I've used Neil's tweet with permission - he's one of my oldest pals in real life :)

Picture 1 shows a tweet on my friend Neil's profile page. 

This first picture is a screenshot of a tweet that I've both favourited (denoted by the partial orange star on the right) and retweeted (shown by the green arrow on the right). There are several clickable links in the original tweet including the Amazon link (which goes to the rather brilliant spoof reviews of the Mr Men series). I couldn't get the View Media link to show me anything but quite often if someone's added a photograph or YouTube video the panel will widen a bit and you can see it. The 5h doesn't go anywhere but clicking on @OldenGlove will bring up the popup version of Neil's profile.

If you hover over the tweet in Neil's profile list...

Picture 2 shows the tweet still on the profile page (in a list of other tweets) - all that's happened is I've hovered over it.

...then a few more things appear. Because I've already retweeted and faved this tweet the icons / text for those show up in green and orange but normally all three (reply, retweet, favorite) appear in blue. The Open link just enlarges the tweet and if the tweet had also been sent in reply to someone else then clicking open will bring up the tweet it was sent in reply to. You don't have to click on the word Open, that white space will do just fine.

When you click on the tweet it will expand... 

Picture 3 - this is the expanded tweet, but it's still in the person's profile, within a list of other tweets.

Opening the tweet can show you embedded media, or the chain of tweets in a threaded conversation. The bit saying 4:56 PM - 3 Feb 12 via web tells you the time and date the tweet was sent and by what means. 'Via web' means via Twitter.com but you might also see things like UberTwitter or Echofon etc appearing here - the timestamp used to be the place where Twitter put the tweet's own URL (each tweet has an URL, this means that every tweet has its own web page!) but now this is the Details link. Clicking the white space  or 'Close' will restore the tweet to its smaller size. Clicking on Details will open the tweet into its own page.

The tweet below has its own page at https://twitter.com/#!/OldenGlove/status/165478688371126272

Picture 4 - the tweet is no longer in a list with other tweets but in its own page. I've hovered over the little disembodied head to bring up some extra information. Note also the Embed this Tweet link.

The only major thing of interest when the tweet's on its own page is the Embed this Tweet link which takes you to a page where you can copy some code and embed it in a blog (on Blogger you'd need to click in the 'HTML' tab of the editing window rather than the default 'Compose'). I'd have to say that the end product isn't too impressive in Blogger (you can see what it looks like below) possibly it's better in other blog platforms (apparently WordPress supports the Shortcode version quite well so use that instead of the html code that shows up in the popup window).

I also hovered over the 'person' icon in the top right - there are some other options available in there, in particular the ability to Turn off Retweets. Selecting this option means you won't see the automatic RTs that people send (the manual RTs where people copy and paste text and stick the word "RT" in front of it will still show up though).

Here's what the embedded tweet looks like (html)

This is lovely: amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-…
— Neil Cole (@OldenGlove) February 3, 2012