Twitter is providing a service that replaces the need to take screenshots of tweets in order to cite a source. It calls this service Blackbird Pie and offer it through Twitter Media. From the site that’s made famous the term ‘fail whale’, will Blackbird Pie be reliable enough for journalists and bloggers to switch to a styled embed method from simple screenshots?
Using Blackbird Pie is a piece of cake easy as pie. Just visit the service at: http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
The next step is to paste a status URL into the line. You can get the status URL by getting the link of a tweet’s timestamp. For example, I’ll grab one of my status URLs: http://twitter.com/404TechSupport/status/13135413941
Then, just hit the Bake it button. This will quickly give you a preview of the tweet and give you the HTML to copy+paste to your blog.
Pasting that code into your site will give you something like this:
Just picked up ‘Wind Energy Basics, Second Edition’ by Paul Gipe http://amzn.to/d5pCvU from the library. One of the perks of the job.
404TechSupport
You can already see that they’re planning on ways to make the embed code shorter and improve the timestamp (it currently lists the time since it was baked). I hope when they’re tweaking the embed code they make the code interchangeable. Like a YouTube video ID, the Twitter embed code could be made into a phpBB BBcode if it were consistent amongst other things.
There you go. Dessert’s on the house. Do you think you’d use this over a screenshot? How would you improve it?