Embedding and emailing your tweets

It’s now possible to embed tweets directly into your blog using free tools such as Twitter Media’s Blackbird Pie, Publitweet’s Blackbird bookmarklet, or Tweetshots.

I’ve tried them out for size, here are the results.

Blackbird Pie

Publitweet Blackbird bookmarklet (their font size: 18)

Publitweet Blackbird bookmarklet (my font size: 13)

Tweetshots

Blackbird Pie gives the best link functionality: to the person I was retweeting, the Guardian article they were citing, my tweet and my Twitter page. However, it gives the relative time (ie “less than a minute ago”), which could be disorienting for people reading your post some days, weeks or months down the line.

Publitweet’s bookmarklet comes next. It links to all of the above, except the person I was retweeting. But if you use their code as is, the font size is too big. I had to go into the code and reduce the size from 18 to 13. The whole point of the bookmarklet is that it requires fewer steps than Blackbird Pie, so it defeats the purpose if you then have to tweak the code – something I prefer not to do, anyway.

One point where Publitweet compares favourably with Blackbird Pie is that it gives the absolute date and time.

I’d rank Tweetshots in third place. It doesn’t mimic the look of my blog, as the other two do. And all of the links take you back to one place: my tweet.

However, Tweetshots has another feature I really like: it allows you to email your tweet. I emailed the above tweet to myself, here’s the screenshot:

Clever, isn’t it? Useful if you want to share a tweet with a non-Twitter user. And it lists the links from your tweet. You can also send your tweet directly to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious.

I love to think of all the developers out there making free apps to enhance our blogs and social media lives. Have you tried these or similar tools? How do you think my embedded tweets compare?

By Marian Dougan