Is the old style of embedding tweets broken?

[mrthomasella]

UPDATE: Ok, I’m seeing similar questions, and the consensus is that this has been discontinued? That in March, it’ll be fully turned off for good? Anyone know of any way I can replicate the look of getting my tweets pulled in as basic text? Or at least a way to use the basic way until March? I saw people talking about JSON and XML v1 but I’m not sure how to use either.

ORIGINAL: So here’s the code I’m using to embed tweets into the sidebar of my website:

script src=“http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js” type=“text/javascript” /script
script src=“http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/whatisdelicious.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=4” type=“text/javascript” /script

It’s not fancy at all, but it works really well with the aesthetic of my website. Or rather, it DID, until it broke recently. I have no idea why; I can only assume they decided to switch things up with this new embedded timeline and that broke my code.

So is there a way of getting this to work again? I really liked having my tweets display as basic text rather than this huge elaborate box that won’t fit in my sidebar. My website is www.whatisdelicious.com if you need to look at it in context. The tweets used to be just below my PlayStation card.

[episod]

Until March, you can adjust your resource URL to “https://api.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=whatisdelicious.json&callback=twitterCallback2&count=4” and have it become valid again. However, it will cease functioning in March 2013 and you’ll need to find another alternative by that point – the embedded timelines is currently the best fit for that context.

[mrthomasella]

Thanks for the quick reply. I tried swapping the URLs out but it doesn’t seem to be working. Is there anything else I need to do? And is there any plan to have embedded timelines be a little more customizable in terms of size and look? Right now, the logos and flair on it are pretty distracting and don’t really fit in to my layout, even if I went with the dark variant with red links.

[chetman]

My guess, Thomas, is that Twitter doesn’t care what you want. Sadly, I’m in your boat, too – it looks like there’s no reasonable and long-term way to do just text tweets as a feed on my blog anymore, either.

I just want a small box on the right sidebar of my blog carrying the TEXT ONLY of my last 8 or 10 tweets. Period. No avatars, no retweet buttons, no reply buttons, just the text. They’re my words, after all. Unless I’m seriously misinterpreting everything I’ve read for the last hour or two, though, Twitter is now actively hostile to this as an idea. Taylor is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I really don’t think I am.

[peterbrowne]

Chet I believe you are correct.

Twitter now want total control over how tweets are represented. Fair enough, it’s their system and brand that we are using and they can implement whatever changes they like. More worrying to me is that the changes will also allow Twitter to track my usage on any site that embeds their tweets or uses the embedded follow button. I guess that building up a mass of targeted data on your users even when they are not “using” your service is an attractive side effect of protecting your brand.

It’s just a shame that the open attitude that drew many of us to Twitter in the first place is fast disappearing.

On a practical level if you didn’t want to go down the api route (after March) I guess you could knock up a screen scraper to grab your content and repost them onto your site but I would assume that this goes against the terms of the site.

[niall]