Tips and Tutorials

Twitter launched a fascinating new tool this week – a simple “baking” tool that takes the URL of a tweet and displays it in a convenient HTML output, allowing users to effectively “embed” tweets into their code. The tool, called Blackbird Pie, will let bloggers and other web developers easily insert tweets into their posts and webpages, effectively guaranteeing that those tweets will stay around even if they’re deleted later.

The new feature is very simple to use – there ‘s a simple text box on the Twitter Blackbird Pie page, allowing users to type in the URL of the tweet they’d like to “bake” into HTML code. Once users click the “bake” button, their tweet is outputted into formatted HTML, which they can then copy and paste into blog posts, forum posts and articles, and anywhere else that accepts HTML.

The move will make it significantly more likely that bloggers and web designers will begin to use the baked html tweets more often. Until now, most people used images that had been captured of tweets; the downside to this strategy is that the images aren’t crawlable by search engines, making the data contained in the tweets effectively invisible. The new feature will allow for quick and easy insertion of tweets, without requiring a separate step to capture, post and link to screenshots.

Already the new Blackbird Pie feature has taken some criticism from savvy web developers who say that the code it outputs is too bloated. Although the code certainly is significant, one of the upshots of the complex code is that it allows users to effectively format the baked tweets from their own end, using only Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Still, Twitter has listed “shorter code” on its list of To Do’s for the Blackbird Pie formatter.

After the initial launch of Twitter’s Blackbird Pie, the feature was temporarily unavailable to many users due to the flood of people rushing to try out the new feature. By now the Blackbird Pie feature seems to have cooled off somewhat, and generating HTML tweets seems to be functioning fine.

So keep your eyes open – you’ll probably start to see a lot of HTML-based tweets showing up on blogs and on websites around the internet – and how that will change search engine rankings for sites showing a large volume of tweets remains to be seen.

Here is an example of what an embeded ‘tweet’  looks like