Moment of geek: Blackbird Pie vs. QuoteURL

Unless you're sitting in front of a computer screen for 12 hours a day, move along: this post is not for you. In fact, the only people who'll care about this are the ones who actually think, multiple times per day, "How long is it gonna take me to embed that Shaq tweet into a blog post?" 

Yesterday, the person behind the semi-hidden media.twitter.com portal -- @twittermedia for those of you without an RSS reader -- unveiled a quick little hack. It's a web page that allows bloggers and other media unprofessionals to embed a tweet in a web page, condensing what used to be a royal pain in the ass (screenshot the Twitter page, chop it up in photo shop, upload graphic into malfunctioning blog engine) into something as simple as embedding a Keyboard Cat clip into your Tumblr (go to page, enter Tweet URL, out comes code). 

The internet went nuts. The guy who created the hack freaked out and clarified that he was just screwing around on his own, and that the embed thingee -- now called Blackbird Pie -- wasn't even an officially-supported Twitter feature yet. 

All of this was super weird to us, since as far as we knew, this capability has been around kind of forever. Some guy figured out how to do it more than a year ago and set up a site called QuoteURL, the only purpose of which is that you type in the URLs of some Tweets and it spits out an embed code. It's pretty awesome. We use it all the time. 

We figure it's only a matter of time until QuoteURL joins the many developers who are being shoved out of the marketplace by Twitter's development binge, which isn't the end of the world: frankly, the Twitter version looks way purtier than what comes out of QuoteURL. And, to be fair, Blackbird Pie does the one thing that, for no good reason, QuoteURL didn't: it allows you to embed a single Tweet, whereas QuoteURL will only allow you to embed multiple Tweets. Like this: 

1. 
   twittermedia Wow, I'm really glad everybody's eager to ditch screen grabs of tweets! But, let me caveat this little hack of mine: //bit.ly/aUv8kG 04 May 2010 from web
2. 
   carlycarioli @twittermedia Thanks for #BlackbirdPie. But unless I'm missing something, @quoteurl still does this better. 2words: multiple tweets! 05 May 2010 from Power Twitter