How to display a tweet? -- Part II

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Last night the wind howled in the hills of Berkeley. It could have been the sound track for the opening scene of a horror movie about global warming. It got me up at 1:30AM with a burning question. What's the best way to display a tweet? 

It's not a joke, it actually happened.  

So I posed the question with a few examples, and a great discussion ensued, and I think we arrived at an excellent answer. 

1. I had assumed that a mini-icon would work the best, but Alexander Horre asked why not use a bit of text, so if someone makes it bigger, the link symbol would grow along with everything else. Good point, and I think that's the way to go. (Many others said the same thing, Alexander was just the first.) 

2. Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy both argued for making the links work just like HTML links, but I didn't see how, until Chuck suggested that we use wiki notation, and this is very workable, and if that formatting is detected any software should recognize it and display it accordingly. Example. 

3. What software? Well lots of apps display text that came from Twitter. Facebook does, as does FriendFeed and many others. Of course I wouldn't have asked this question if I weren't too.