I posted this internally at Medium on December 1, 2014 to get feedback and build on the idea. It became part of a larger effort, part of which launched yesterday. For more technical details on how we built this feature, read this post from Nick Santos. (More context on Inside Medium.)
What if we formalized the paragraph screengrab Twitter hack?
Increasingly I’ve been seeing screenshots of articles attached to tweets on Twitter like this:
It’s a great way to quickly highlight an especially good part of an article and then link to it. It gives users a way to snapshot the part that they feel is most important/good/memorable/pertinent to the article and gives readers/followers a glimpse of the content & a link to it so they can read if they get hooked on the image preview.
It would be cool if we formalized this on Medium for sharing. Imagine being able to highlight part of the post, longer than 140 characters, (and with images!) and hitting the Twitter button and all of a sudden a gorgeous image of that passage appears with the normal 140 characters for you to type. Maybe we could leverage the work that Marcin put in for the prettify print version of Medium even.
It could turn something generic like this:
Into something more meaningful and engaging like this:
