Twitter Launches ‘Blackbird Pie’: Generate Fresh-baked Tweets to Embed in Your Blog Posts

Twitter launched its new tool called “Blackbird Pie” (aka “Embed this tweet” feature) yesterday, that allows you (bloggers) to easily embed tweets into a website or blog post in much the same way as you embed videos from YouTube or other websites.

The tool simply asks you for the URL of a tweet, once you copy that in and hit “Bake it,” you get back a preview of how it’ll look on the web, and a box with the code you need in it. So basically, this new feature of Twitter is designed to make it easier to embed a tweet within a web document.

“The origin of the script is both self- and user-centered. Mostly, we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets. But of course we also think it’s a much better user experience to have @-mentions, hashtags and the account itself all linked and clickable,” writes Twitter. You can try it for yourself here — just copy and paste the URL for a static tweet and then “bake it.”

Anyone who runs a website, whether it be a blog with a few readers or a major publication that caters to millions, knows that reproducing the wisdom of a tweet on an HTML page can be a tricky affair.

With the new ‘Blackbird Pie‘ feature, Twitter aims to solve the tweet quoting problem by providing web authors with a special snippet of code that can be used to embed a tweet in all its HTML glory, including the author’s avatar, links, and a snapshot of the author’s actual tweet.

At any rate it is kind of great, because all the links/names in these tweets are clickable so readers could trace information back to its source. A great example is, if a tweet is actually a reply to someone, you could click on a “in reply to” link just as you can on Twitter.com to get some context.

Interestingly the generated text is so static that even the ‘less than a minute ago via web’ shall stay static without dynamically changing the tweet time. The feature is a step in the right direction, but in the present form, it is something that clearly needs refinement.

In fact, “Blackbird Pie” is a prototype and doesn’t work on Tumblr. And “Note that this is not guaranteed to work on your platform; it works for us here on a very plain WordPress install. If it does work, when you paste the tweet into your post, it will pick up some of your styling, e.g. the font-family you use on your <p> tags. That’s intentional!”, adds Twitter.

Embedded tweets are likely to become a welcome addition to the arsenal of functionality provided by the social media giant. If you’re tired of making screenshots of tweets, and had been looking for an alternative that includes the ability to learn more about (or follow) the people who are quoted, then the ‘Blackbird Pie’ is a twitter feature that will be welcomed by you with open arms.