Twitter Launches Blackbird Pie Tool To Embed Tweets

Following up on yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would release a tool to let sites embed the HTML version of tweets without taking screenshots, the company has pushed the tool live. Called “Blackbird Pie”, the tool takes URLs of tweets and turns them into easily embeddable HTML. While it’s useful for not having to take screenshots and to boost Twitter’s SEO, there are definitely some remaining bugs.

For example, to embed our tweet below, we had to add the no-repeat value for the background image as the tool didn’t carry that aspect over. Additionally, the Blackbird Pie tool takes a good 10 seconds before the tweet is processed. Ultimately that just requires some optimization on Twitter’s end but it’s interesting to see that the tool is kind of difficult to use.

It’s also pretty clear that the tool was rushed out overnight and now the company is asking users to let them know of any bugs. We only found two but we also agree that being able to easily embed tweets is useful. Let us know what you think of the new Blackbird Pie tool.

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/90302623/st-twitter-bg.jpg) #4a5358;background-repeat:no-repeat;padding:20px;}p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px}p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

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