Frankly, tweeting has come to feel kind of tedious itself . It’s not the mechanics of the actual act of tweeting so much as the mental drain involved in (a) reading the text of an article and (b) figuring out which particular textual fragment is the most tweet-worthy. That whole pre-tweeting cognitive process has become a time-sink.
That’s why the arrival of the inline tweet — the readymade tweetable nugget, prepackaged, highlighted, and activated with a single click — is such a cause for celebration. The example above comes from a C.W. Anderson piece posted today by the Nieman Journalism Lab. “When is news no longer what’s new but what matters?” Who wouldn’t want to tweet that? It’s exceedingly pithy. The New York Times has also begun to experiment with inline tweets, and it’s already seeing indications that the inclusion of prefab tweetables increases an article’s overall tweet count. I think the best thing about the inline tweet is that you no longer have to read, or even pretend to read, what you tweet before you tweet it. Assuming you trust the judgment of a publication’s in-house tweet curator, or tweet-curating algorithm, you can just look for the little tweety bird icon, give the inline snippet a click, and be on your way. Welcome to linking without thinking!
Please click through to the original and you’ll see that Nick has thoughtfully singled out his best aphoristic zingers for immediate tweetability. What a guy.