David Emery Online

Twitter and Apple recently announced a nice-ish integration between iTunes Ping and Twitter – I say ‘ish’ as auto-tweeting should never be a default on things like this, and the use of long iTunes urls is a bit baffling. Anyhow, the nicest bit is that on twitter.com in the new Tweet side pane you get a nifty little embeded preview box, where you can see the release artwork, track listing and track previews.

After a bit of digging it turns out that it’s very straight forward to pull this code out and use it on your own site:

<iframe src="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbumSocialPreview?wdId=32800&id=393321669&s=143444" style="border: none; width: 100%; height: 450px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" scrolling="no"></iframe

Or a single track:

<iframe src="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbumSocialPreview?i=393321680&wdId=32800&id=393321669&s=143444" style="border: none; width: 100%; height: 110px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" scrolling="no"></iframe><br />

Sadly I can’t quite decipher the URL structure iframe uses – it’s easy enough to get the ‘id’ (which referrers to an album) and the ‘i’ which refers to a track from the share links you get out of iTunes, but the ‘wdId’ remains a mystery to me, so to make the embeds you’ll need to post to twitter from iTunes, then right click on the iFrame embed on Twitter.com and get it’s SRC.

Hopefully might be useful to someone!