Blackbird Pie: First Thoughts

Yesterday I heard about Blackbird Pie, a new tool from Twitter to create embeddable tweets. This actually sounded like a useful tool, as there are times I embed screenshots in my posts, some of those being twitter captures. My hope was that with embedded tweets, they’d be interactive (e.g. clickable if there was a link).

So off I went to http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie. The claim was that it was faster and easier to embed a tweet.

My initial experience was, um, slower and impossible to embed a tweet. Regardless of which tweet URL I inserted into the UI, I received notice that the tweet did not exist when, in fact, it did (sorry, no screenshot for that). And after only 3 or 4 attempts, I was told that I exceeded some limit. Eventually, the site slowed to a crawl and showed me this:

At this point, I gave up for the day.  And I was all set to move on, until I saw a bit more positive traffic about Blackbird Pie this morning. So I gave it one more attempt.  This time it loaded extremely fast and worked on a tweet that failed to render yesterday. The UI generated an embeddable chunk of html/css:

Pasting this in to this blog post, “magic happens” my tweet gets embedded, though not rendered the way I expected:

Just looked at my dev calendar: 7 #Azure talks scheduled between now and Sept, including a 2-day bootcamp. http://dmak.us/9VQX1rless than a minute ago via webDavid Makogon
dmakogon

Just as advertised, my tweet is embedded, and it was incredibly easy. It included my twitter page background. And… all links are preserved: twitter search, site URL, and my profile. Sweet!

UPDATE: Once I published the post, I noticed that the embedded tweet looked nothing like it did inside Windows Live Writer. This is what it looked like prior to publishing, which is not how the actual embedded tweet appears:

There might be special tweaks required for embedding in Blogger posts…

Twitter added some disclaimers, so I suspect this tool will be going through revisions pretty quickly as it rises in popularity. For instance, here’s the disclaimer when adding a URL to bake:

And here’s the disclaimer just following your baked tweet:

Disclaimers aside, this is very cool! I like the idea of an interactive tweet, rather than an unclickable static image (or a static image that I have to wrap a hyperlink around). However, this is not yet ready for prime time, as my embedded tweets are not rendering properly on Blogger.