Eating Twitter’s Blackbird Pie

May 4th, 2010 Ryan Jones

What better way to spend the first few minutes of my lunch break than to eat some Blackbird Pie. That’s twitter’s new name for their HTML version of tweet screenshots. Now, instead of taking a screenshot, pasting it into ms paint, cropping, saving, and uploading (or using a 3rd party service like tweetshots,) Twitter users can simply use this new feature to include a clickable, copy and pasteable tweet.

Here’s what it looks like:

This is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, but it’s still not very useable. Honestly, I was expecting a lot more from twitter. After 10 seconds of playing with it, some issues presented themselves:

1. It’s Not Dynamic at All. There’s nothing dynamic about this. You can’t use it to automatically generate boxes for tweets, and there’s no API. When I first heard of the service I thought “sweet, finally I can embed tweets into an application given only the twitter status ID.” Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Sure, I could use the API to grab all the parts of the tweet and then rebuild their HTML, but I could have done that on my own without Blackbird Pie. I want a way to create these automatically on the fly.

2. The Code is a Mess. Twitter acknowledged this, but it seems like they were rushing because this should have never seen the light of day in its current form. I’m not talking about the sheer amount of code either, I’m talking about the code being broken. It’s got extra </span> tags for Christ’s sake. If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s another widget that spews broken code onto my websites.

3. They don’t play well together. Putting multiple instances of the widget on the same page (like I did below) seems to cause a few formatting and styling issues. When I added the fake Matt Cutts tweet below, it seems to have changed my background above to his funky purple thing.

UPDATE: perhaps the best part of blackbird pie is its ability to put words into peoples mouths:

It’s a good first attempt Twitter, but frankly you rushed it a bit. Tons of people want this feature, and tons of people will use it (as evidenced by it going down several types as I was playing with it,) but it’s nowhere close to what it can truly be. I’m hoping this is just the first step toward making the @anywhere API extremely useful. Stick that pie back in the oven for a bit and let me know when it’s done!

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