How to Use Twitter’s Embeddable Tweets Feature on Your Blog, Step-By-Step

There was lots of talk today about Twitter's entry into the Android market with its own app. However, another interesting announcement was a tool to allow you to embed a tweet. Here is an example of a tweet about this new development that I made earlier today:

The code is written to pick up some of the styles in your blog template, and also all of the links in the post are clickable, which is something that you can get from the usual screen capture and link back method. It also picks up a “frame” with the original background from the quoted Twitter user. And I just noticed if you use more than one it goes to a default background. You might also notice stuff because @robinsloan, who released the script/code says that it is a hack she put together, and is a prototype. So you can make recommendations and comments about anything you run into directly to @twittermedia.

Step-by-Step Instructions
for Inserting an Embeddable Tweet

1. Choose the Tweet you want to use on the Web by clicking on its timestamp
2. Copy the unique URL for the Tweet
3. Go to the Blackberry Pie tool on Twitter’s Media Site
4. Paste the URL in the box under the Blackberry Pie Header
5. Click “Bake It”
6. Once the code is generated, it is pretty long, copy and open your blogging platform.
7. Go to the HTML view and past the code
8. Write something intelligent, witty or otherwise interesting around the quote
9. Tweet the person that you quoted to let them know that you did
10. See? It is easy as pie – Blackberry Pie!

More tips: If you have trouble getting the tweets to format correctly when you publish, as I did, you can try a few things. You might want to publish directly from the HTML view as switching to the visual field (in Blogger and sometimes in WordPress) can break the code. I have also heard that some people are encasing the code in a unique div tag, which looks like this <div;> and be sure to close at the end with </div&gt.;