The Truth about “Embeddable” Tweets
Mashable and TechCrunch (as well as the rest of the techbloggery) picked up via the Twitter Media blog that an embeddable tweet “feature” was on its way. The “feature” was released under the name Blackbird Pie and it works like this:
1) Find a tweet you want to embed.
2) Enter the tweet link into Blackbird Pie and “bake it”.
3) Out of the oven comes an embeddable HTML code.
4) Cut and Paste the code wheverevahh.
Sounds a bit janky, no? That’s because it is. Wouldn’t it have been more cutting edge and in line with the Twitter product to make tweets embeddable like YouTube videos are (basically one-click, copy, paste)? Sure. (A scathing Silicon Alley Insider piece agrees). Buuuuuuuut, slow down a minute…
Caroline McCarthy of CNET’s “the social” had this to say:
For what it’s worth, “embeddable tweets” and its “blackbird pie” branding was basically a single employee’s internal toy that he decided to open up for public use. Wasn’t intended to be a big product launch, and in retrospect, may not have merited the press coverage it got. (I’m guilty.)
Still, a sign that maybe the oversight is a little bit lax over there if an employee can push his wacky pet project out like that.
Agreed again on (almost) all points. Not sure this deserved the hype, but twitter did little to quash the high expectations of the reports. In the end the joke’s on everyone. It is actually pretty nifty for a pet project - and much handier than taking the screenshot route. Whether the oversight was lax is debatable - if anything it shoes that twitter is encouraging and sees the value in how employees are personally developing on top of the twitter platform.
This is all far from the end though. Soon enough the twitter machine will crank out some sort of one click embed system for us all to drool over. La-de-la, and keep loving tech. Or something.
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