Hot El. @ Civic Center Muni Metro Station http://instagr.am/p/J5UN/—
MG Siegler (@parislemon) November 05, 2010
Back in May, Twitter unveiled a small tool called Blackbird Pie. Essentially, it was a way to the process of using a Tweet in a blog post easier. Rather than having to take a screenshot of the Tweet, you could just copy the URL into Blackbird Pie and out would pop some dynamically generated code for embedding the Tweet in your post, complete with working links. It was an interesting idea, sadly, no one uses it. But a key WordPress integration today should change that.
As they note on their own blog, WordPress has just enabled Blackbird Pie for all WordPress.com blogs. It works in posts and in comments too. All you have to do to bring a Tweet in is copy the URL for it and put it somewhere in your post on its own line. Says the company:
To embed a tweet in your blog, all you need to do is visit the tweet on Twitter.com that you would like to use, copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into your post on a line by itself. WordPress.com will do the rest and your link will be converted to a full tweet once we pull the relevant data (there may be a short delay).
That should be a very useful new feature. And self-hosted WordPress blogs can use the Blackbird Pie plugin to enable the same thing.
What’s sort of interesting about this feature is the Twitter policy which states you’re not allowed to use other peoples’ Tweets without their permission. The company has said that’s meant to stop advertisers from pulling Tweets and using them for their own means, but the wording still clearly says that you can’t do it. This tool not only enables that, it encourages it.
An example Tweet of mine is above. As you can see, all the links work, which is awesome. And it even pulls my actual Twitter background! Compare it to the screenshot version below.
More: Twitter Brings Back The Old School Retweet With The Blackbird Pie Tool!
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
WordPress.com offers a popular and free blogging platform which competes with Google’s Blogger and Six Apart’s TypePad. WordPress.com is a version of the open-source WordPress package hosted and maintained by Automattic. TechCrunch, Giga Omni Media and other prominent technology blog networks use WordPress.com’s VIP program.
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