Twitter offers embeddable tweets, complicated for a reason?

Embedding individual tweets

Yesterday, Twitter alluded to a big announcement that they will offer embeddable tweets so users could refer to individual messages on Twitter without the hassle of taking screenshots of the message, uploading to a blog, adding links, etc.

Today, Twitter announced how users will be able to embed tweets with their new service “Blackbird Pie.” With Blackbird Pie, users can copy and paste the URL of a specific tweet (found by clicking the time stamp of any tweet) into the code generator, then users copy and paste the code into a blog post.

What Blackbird Pie looks like in use:

What Blackbird Pie looks like when embedded:

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My thought: it’s stupid and overcomplicated

So instead of just adding an “embed” button like this…

…Twitter has decided to “make it simple” and offer a new service on a new website that asks you to hunt down the URL of the specific tweet, copy and paste it into the other website, generate an embed code, then copy and paste THAT into your blog. It sounds stupid and overcomplicated to me, just give me a frickin’ button.

Here’s the rub- Twitter can do what they want, I’m actually excited that they’re doing something with the millions of dollars that they’re oozing, even if it’s not innovative… at least it’s something. But Twitter isn’t being honest about their reasoning for offering Blackbird Pie, the embeddable tweet website. Twitter isn’t admitting that they’ve lost control over trending topics, rendering them useless, and I believe this is one way for them to replace trending topics with “most quoted tweets” or something similar.

Twitter isn’t being honest that this is a move to get a better grip on data and how it is being used because currently, the third party sites have taken away the ability to analyze data simply because desktop apps, mobile apps, third party apps all skew the data of actual Twitter use. Embedding tweets gives a unique data point for Twitter to measure and there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t call an overcomplicated process “simple” when that’s a thinly veiled reason for releasing a product.

Twitter isn’t doing anything wrong, but they’re not being honest with the reasons behind their new project- I don’t suspect ease of use is anywhere near the top of the list, there are many more reasons that trump that and the public will remain in the dark.