Twitter Cooks Up The Blackbird Pie Tool To Bake Tweets Into Your Website

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

As we noted yesterday, Twitter has launched its new tool that allows you to easily embed tweets into a website or blog post. The tool, called Blackbird Pie, is a website that simply asks you for the URL of a tweet. Once you copy that in and hit “Bake it,” you get back a preview of how it will look on the web, and a box with the code you need in it.

The origin of the script is both self- and user-centered. Mostly, we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets. But of course we also think it’s a much better user experience to have @-mentions, hashtags and the account itself all linked and clickable,” writes Twitter.

A few nice things about the tool: 1) it picks up the styling of your own site. “Note that when you paste it into your site, the tweet will pick up some of your styling, e.g. the font-family you use on your tags. That’s intentional!,” Twitter writes (noting that it may change this). 2) It also copies over whatever background a person uses on Twitter. So in that regard, it is just like taking a screen grab. 3) The embeddable tweets actually look nicer than the one Twitter previewed yesterday on its media site.

While the embed code is a mess of inline elements right now, they promise shorter code is coming. They’re also asking that bug reports be tweeted at @twittermedia.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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