Twitter introduced Blackbird Pie back in May of this year, providing the world with an easy way to embed fully functional tweets.
Before Blackbird Pie’s introduction, the common way to embed tweets was to simply take a screenshot. Blackbird Pie not only easily embeds the tweet itself, but also leaves the profile link, @-mentions, hashtags, and other links in tact. Despite Blackbird Pie’s usefulness and firm roots in Twitter, it’s received little recognition over the past months.
Blackbird Pie will be getting some well-deserved recognition now that it has been fully integrated with WordPress.com, and those of you with self-hosted WordPress blogs can join the party too with the Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin.
What do you think of Blackbird Pie? Will you be making use of it on your blog?
Nope. Using Blackbird Pie puts you at the mercy of the tweet’s author. If the tweet is deleted, you’ll get a broken link and the content will be gone. Sure, I’ll get a broken link on my screen capture, but the substance of the post will remain.
You have a point there. Unless Blackird Pie somehow made it so that the tweets stayed there whether they were deleted on Twitter or not…
I was using it on my political blog, but will reconsider based on what Brent just said. I just hadn’t noticed tweets getting canned on a regular basis, but then again, if something controversial is posted and then deleted, I’d rather have a solid record I can point back to showing that it happened.
I’ve been to the demo site and God… those embedded tweets are ugly as hell. If you spend a lot of time and effort designing your Web site trying to give it a consistent look, an embedded tweet (each with a different background, of course and the tumbnail of a tweeter 🙂 will, surely, make your page more “interesting”. Which is not necessarily a good thing.
Not to mention losing page rank flow with all those links pointing away from your site (not everyone knows how to make them ‘nofollow’)
Last, but not least, it takes away the focus of the post and the blog itself, giving more attention to the twitter link than to the content of the article (image in my case).
Don’t get me wrong, I do have a Twitter account, I even have all of my tweets archived locally on my server in real-time and Twitter has been a regular tool for me, and an useful addition to my promotional efforts and activities, but this is just too much 🙂
I like…I’ve been using Tweetboard for a while but been looking for something different. Going to check this out….
Lol, first off – I love the name. Blackbird pie. Sometimes, I just want to take up programming, just so I can make a useful tool with a clever name to spin off facebook or twitter or digg. Maybe a digg “mole man” tool. lol
I think i’ll give the plug-in a try – I’m curious to see it in action.
Nice plugin, I think Twitter (like Facebook) can really help our blog ranking on search engine, so this plugin can be very useful. I will try it!
While it is simple and easy to use, I’m not sure it is the best tool for the job.
Unless you use the API once and store the tweet server side, you will tend to be at the mercy of the API availability and the user (not deleting their tweet).
A more obvious solution is a screenshot.