Tweets Are Almost the New Quotes

Yesterday the official Twitter blog announced that they would be releasing a feature allowing embedded Tweets, similar to how we embed YouTube videos.

Earlier today the feature went live on a site called Blackbird Pie,

The origin of the script is both self- and user-centered. Mostly, we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets. But of course we also think it’s a much better user experience to have @-mentions, hashtags and the account itself all linked and clickable.

I’ve played with a little bit, and there still seems to be some bugs. For example, the site gave me several errors for tweets it claimed did not exist (but subsequently identified). There’s also some formatting problems to work out for different platforms.

On WordPress, which Slaw uses, it looks a little something like this:

It doesn’t look anything like the sample tweets that should embed like this:

Part of the problem with integration will be the challenge with embed codes on group blogs generally, which can be linked to different levels of authorization (some plug-ins do exist to address this). But if Twitter can work out the problems this will provide a far better alternative than the screenshot/upload combo.