New Twitter feature lets you embed tweets in your blog posts with original formatting

by Rob Cottingham | May 5, 2010 | Blogging, Social Signal

Updated: Thanks to Mitch Cohen for this comment pointing to a one-click bookmarklet – even easier!

Blackbird Pie (kind of a gruesome name, if you’ve grown attached to the Twitter icon) is a new Twitter service that lets you post individual tweets to your blog or web site – keeping that good ol’ Twitter formatting intact, while picking up elements of your site’s design (such as the typeface) as well.

Now, because of certain style overrides we have on SocialSignal.com, the result isn’t quite as picturesque as we might like:

There’s a certain amount of overlap and such. But it’s still pretty sweet, especially since our workflow used to be:

1. Load tweet in browser.
2. Capture screen. (We use Skitch, so we don’t have to…)
3. Crop screen capture image and save.
4. Upload image file to our site.
5. Paste a link to the image file in our blog editor.
6. Add alt text with the contents of the tweet.

With Blackbird Pie, the workflow is:

1. Copy tweet URL.
2. Paste into Blackbird Pie, and copy resulting embed code.
3. Paste embed code into blog editor.

So much easier. And now the text is selectable by others – not a minor issue from an SEO standpoint, either. And it preserves hyperlinks to the original tweet, the Twitter client and the originating Twitter profile.

I like that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is making it easy for people to see the larger context of a tweet: a conversation, for instance, or the user’s Twitter stream. And if you’re trying to blog about a longer Twitter conversation, citing several tweets, this could save you a whole lot of time.

There are plenty of caveats – among other things, it doesn’t work on Tumblr yet, and I keep having to fight the urge to call it “Blackberry Pie” – but it’s a handy tool to have.