embedded tweets - TheWayoftheWeb

Ingredients missing from Twitter's Blackbird Pie to embed tweets

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.

Buffer

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.

Buffer