Blackbird Pie is the newest Twitter tool to be released. The tool (or toy, depending on how you look at it) is simple enough to use. To test it out, I found a witty tweet by my tweep Alex Friedman, a quirky online marketer and comedian here in Denver who tweets a lot about the giant tin ball she is building in her office. Normally, if I wanted to embed a tweet in a blog post I would take a screen shot like the one below and save it to my desktop, then upload it to the media library in Wordpress and insert it into my blog post (which is exactly what I did to embed the tweet below into this post.) The process takes somewhere around five minutes, depending on how much coffee I’ve had.
To test Blackbird Pie, I copied the URL of Alex’s tweet and then pasted it into Blackbird Pie’s form field. After clicking the “Bake It” button, I was presented with a block of html code and a preview of what Alex’s tweet would look like once I baked it into my blog. The preview looked really promising, so I got pretty excited.
But I shouldn’t have. When I pasted the code into the html editor of this blog, which runs on Wordpress and Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme, this is what I got:
My blog roll and your blog role were sitting by the fire… My blog roll says to your blog roll, “I’m gonna set your RSS on fire!”
Alexandra Friedman
AlexFriedman
Yeah … it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but it did include links back to the actual tweet as well as Alex’s full Twitter stream. To be fair, the developer puts several warnings on her site that Blackbird Pie is an experiment in beta testing. @RobinSloan of Twitter Media even goes as far to see that you are welcome to use Blackbird Pie, “but only at your own risk” LOL. To be even more fair, I should admit that I have 0nly tested Blackbird Pie on Wordpress blogs running the Thesis theme and didn’t put much effort into trying to style it. Actually, all I did was copy and paste the Blackbird Pie-generated code into my post. With a little time and effort, I might be able to clean the Tweet’s styling up. But that would be a lot more work than embedding a screenshot into a post.
Blackbird Pie is a great idea, it just isn’t fully baked … yet, that is. I am looking forward to future releases that render prettier versions of the originally tweets across multiple platforms (including Wordpress with the Thesis theme). And I’m definitely going to start following @RobinSloan’s tweets so I can be one of the first to know about the next release.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It was so close, so close! Bummer that it didn’t fully bake into your post, but it has great potential… I especially like that the developer was is a chick! You are right about the 5 minute chore of adding photos to Wordpress, and Blackbird Pie seems like a tasty and refreshing resource when it is no longer “Half Baked.”
Thanks for the love Christy, I feel so haughty now. “Talkin’ ’bout Hey now, Hey now!”
Yep, now I can never ever doubt your funny factor, Lauren, even if my reminder is only HALF-baked into my own blog. I agree, Blackbird Pie will be a tasty resource when it comes out of the next oven. Props to @robinsloan and other female devs! & other types of female innovators!
On other fronts, how is your website / blog coming along? Baking nicely I hope?