Ingredients missing from Twitter's Blackbird Pie to embed tweets

May 4, 2010 By 1 Comment

Twitter’s message embedding tool, Blackbird Pie, is now live. Well at least it would be, if the application hadn’t already toppled over due to the interest in it:

Twitter's new Blackbird Pie application for embedding tweets crashes on launch day

The above tweet had to be captured the old-fashioned way. But having had a look at the posts about the service before it fell over, I have to admit I’m fairly disapointed so far.

So on the plus side:

  • You just submit the url of a tweet to get the code
  • It picks up the font used in your tags to emulate your blog style.
  • It copies whatever background the original tweeter used.
  • The @tags, hashtags and account itself are all clickable.

But on the downside:

  • It was never that tricky to embed a tweet before – I just used the Aviary plugin for Firefox for a quick screengrab, upload the image, and then manually link to the account or hashtag as needed.
  • I’ve yet to see someone display an embedded tweet, but what happens if Twitter decides to remove that content from their system?
  • The block of code provided is a huge amount to copy and paste just to embed an element. Certainly something I wouldn’t want to have to edit to fit the size of any site/blog.
  • It seems like a hugely missed opportunity so far. Embedding an individual tweet isn’t a problem – but what is more problematic is capturing a few, or a whole conversation between one or more people. I’m sure I’ve seen one tool for capturing conversations but can’t remember what it is, and using my own quick screenshot method or Blackbird Pie it’ll still be a pain.
  • It’s crashed already, despite being built by people familiar with the size and scale of Twitter. And it’s not even showing a Fail Whale (Fail bird?)

Blackbird Pie seems undercooked

I’m really not sure why Twitter has released this now. We’ve had their acquisition of Tweetie, the release of BlackBerry and Android applications, and the launch of Promoted Tweets. Why rush out something which doesn’t actually offer anything particularly beneficial to users? Unless it’s simply there to add control for Twitter (And perhaps promotional partners).

After all, it may help when dealing with DMCA issues with particular messages.

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Embed options for Tweets coming tomorrow

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

From tomorrow you can display messages from Twitter on your blog or website without having to save the image, edit it, upload it, and then manually add a link.

So rather than all of that, from May 4th, you’ll be able to grab some HTML code which you can then embed without any image editing.

Handy for bloggers, and hinting that more tools for sharing and curating rivers of tweets will be on the way soon. In some ways it’s quite surprising, considering Glam had monetised a curated Twitter feed back in February 2009. Suddenly you don’t need to be an insightful content creator or a developer to do something quite interesting – a new group of curators could now come to the fore to make sense of the streams of information flowing through in realtime. And although mainstream news organisations will undoubtedly give it a try, that’s also got to open up the options for more specialised and niche publications, or niche experts in subjects which journalists don’t always do a great job of covering.

Of course, it also guarantees that every embedded link will carry a (presumably followed by Google) link to boost Twitter’s search ranking for whatever terms are including in it, and it also gives Twitter another platform which is could use to push out advertising or other monetisation attempts.

Presumably it also will mean that tweets can be wiped out at the source – if a tweet was deleted until now, all the embedded screenshot images will remain. If everyone starts using HTML embeds and tweets are removed, all the evidence goes with them.

Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to silence someone temporarily on Twitter

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Need to mute someone’s tweets while you take a break for a bit? Fed up of hearing about a particular event or seeing a contact in an argument with someone? Worried that you might forget to reconnect if you unfollow them?

Muuter allows you to temporarily unfollow someone by automatically adding them again when a set time is reached.  Effectively it automates unfollowing and then following again after a period of a few hours – hopefully by which time the conference/event/argument has ended, and stopping that person from completing overwhelming your timeline.

Allow Muuter access by authenticating your account via OAuth, and you can select users to mute by direct messaging the service. There are also two bookmarklets to silence people via your web browser.

One thing to keep in mind is that every request counts towards your API usage, so don’t go crazy – as they say in the Muuter FAQs, if you’re looking to regularly block the same person or want to avoid them for long periods of time, it may be that you should just unfollow them once and for all!

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Not sure how to monetise your eyeballs?

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

While newspaper and magazine owners are still trying to decide whether or not they should aim for eyeballs or paywalls, there are several other companies who are happy to take up the challenge.

For instance, online social media publisher Mashable has signed a deal to syndicate content to Thursday editions of Metro in the U.S. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is already a regular on CNN in the U.S, and Mashable and CNN. Plus Mashable has partnered with CNN for the Mashable Media Summit 2010.

It’s interesting to see that mainstream publications and online publications are increasingly merging, but the ‘digital natives’ seem less worried and more sure that they’ve already got the monetisation aspect under control.

One reason is that by the time the likes of Mashable and Techcrunch have reached their current scale, they have already had to answer the questions of how to fund an online business. But as they grew from relatively humble beginnings, they’ve tackled it as they’ve grown without having to worry about legacy systems and overheads.

And by the same token, if you look at the staffing levels – Mashable lists 20 staff, and Techcrunch lists 21.

Compare that to the epic lists of staff at most magazines, for example, and you can see a big contrast.  There are print magazines run by smaller teams, but none that have the scale of the leading blogs (Or at least what started out as blogs).

So how do you produce so much content with a small team across all our properties? Simple, count the guest posts and the open offers to submit work to the likes of Mashable and Techcrunch.

Then consider a quote from the 2010 PPA Conference from the Chief Executive of Future Publishing, Stevie Spring:

“Advertisers are scared of the prospect of seeing their ads next to user-generated content. This won’t change. All it takes is one bad example to put brands off.”

That’s why sites which benefit from user-generated content are filtering and curating that content to get value out of it. There’s a reason why there are successful businesses based around user-generated content, but 4Chan isn’t one of them.

Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing, newspapers Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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