I will be the first to admit that sometimes I don’t “get” stuff that I come across on the Internet. And such it is with Twitter’s new offering, Blackbird Pie. The whole time I was trying it, I was thinking, “And this is better than a screen shot how?”

You can get an overview of Blackbird Pie at http://media.twitter.com/411/fresh-baked-tweets and the tool itself at http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/. Briefly:

You might find an interesting quote on Twitter that you want to, well, quote. You can quote it the regular way, with, like, quotation marks, or you can take a screen shot of the quote. (I don’t know why this developed as a method — do you take a screen shot of a Web page every time you quote it?) Or you can use Blackbird Pie.

With Blackbird Pie, you enter the URL of a tweet (Direct URLs look like this: http://twitter.com/FakeAPStylebook/status/13449746429), and it spits out a huge line of code. Copy that line of code to your Web site, and you may or may not get a live version of the quote (that is to say, the direct URL is clickable, the Tweeter’s account is clickable, etc.) I say “May or may not” because this tool is not meant to work with some sites.

Let’s see if it works for me.

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/62706301/fakeapbg.gif) #EBEBEB;padding:20px;}p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px}p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

If you saw a snarky tweet from FakeAPStylebook, it worked. If not…

The person who developed this, Robin Sloan, said he did it because “we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets.” My setup makes it incredibly simple to take screen shots (which is why most of my writeups include screenshots nowadays). Further, I’m a little worried about the external image reference to Twimg.com. If Twitter goes down will that make the tweet impossible to load? And what happens if FakeAPStylebook deletes this quote?

I like Mr. Sloan’s idea, and if it were something like embedding a live, refreshing Twitter List I would be right there (why oh why oh WHY don’t Twitter Lists offer RSS feeds?) but I don’t understand the need to embed one tweet at a time. I just don’t get it. It’s probably me.