As Twitter has skyrocketed, News and Sports programs, Magazines and Newspapers have all begun to cite tweets as quotes. When a tweet is quoted however, it often leaves out vital information that provides the context. If the quote is in text form, it typically removes the hashtags and retweets–essentially taking the quote out of context. If the quote is utilized in a more visual media medium, then the solution has been to take screen grabs and insert the images. This is rough and clunky method.
If indeed tweets are the new quotes, then a smoother way to display them has been needed. Twitter has baked up just the recipe. Today they introduced Blackbird Pie, its embeddable tweet engine. Twitter has developed a web page where you enter in the url of the particular tweet, and then utilize the embedding code that they provide.
Upon initial testing, it appeared that Twitter was not expecting its popularity, and needed to iron out some of the bugs. When we attempted to put in a tweet, it came back with an error message that the tweet didn’t exist. Twitter quickly attempted to fix the issue, although it still seems to be having some issues with its stability. The tweet below was embedded using their new method.
Okay, here’s a simple tool that makes static HTML tweets for blog posts & news articles. It’s called Blackbird Pie: http://bit.ly/aiEx8l
Twitter Media
twittermedia
The embedded tweet is supposed to pick up some of your own websites’ styling, such as the font-family tag. It is also designed to display with the background design of the tweeter. However the amount of code they provide for embedding is quite lengthy. Fortunately this is a work in progress. Twitter has already declared to-do items such as providing a shorter embed code, and creating a better timestamp.
As for now, embedding tweets is still a bulky process. But at least it is progressing. Hopefully soon enough, there will be a more simple option.
This is a really good article. I am still trying to figure out how useful it would be though. Your example helps me gets ideas though.
I also found that when pasting the code into WordPress in HTML view and switching to Visual view, it affects the embed code by stripping some of the styling info.
An update from media.twitter: This embedding feature was mainly a hack that an employee of twitter uses, who decided to make it public on their blog.
He clarifies: “To be clear, this is just @robinsloan here, pitching a little hack of mine. Please regard it as such, even though it lives on this fancy domain. Seeing people call it a “feature” is making me cringe, because I know what kind of care goes into real Twitter features! This is not one of those…Let me underscore the point: in the course of writing this blog, I coded up a simple script that I found helpful, so I decided to share it with you. It’s a prototype. It’s really rough. It doesn’t even work in a lot of places! But that’s what we mean by “experiment,” right?”
Either way, I think its great progress in attempting to simplify and beautify a process.
This is very interesting… it brings up an important issue and is great info on the new tool!
I also found that when pasting the code into WordPress in HTML view and switching to Visual view, it affects the embed code by stripping some of the styling info.
I have come across this same situation. It is not just with twitter, as I have experienced this in a few different scenarios. It is a fault of wordpress, and as you have figured out, you will just need to save or update while in code view, and not switch back to visual view.
Two things about “Baked Tweets” or Blackbird Pie
1. Twitter doesn’t support it anymore. That link has referring links to places that do it now.
2. Embed.ly does a really good job of it. Or use the Blackbird Pie plugin for WordPress