We’ve enabled a really neat feature on WordPress.com recently. The ability to display tweets in all their glory as simple as pasting a link in your post as shown below.

This is made possible by the excellent Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin, which this post is a test of on myself-hosted blog (see update below). :)

This plugin is:

• a simple alternative to running a more complete plugin such as Tweet Import or Fresh from FriendFeed and Twitter (also interesting).
• an effective way of importing such data (though unstructured) since Twitter Blackbird Pie stores the HTML output of the tweet in a custom field.
• very easy to use as it supports shortcodes (with a GUI) and even inline oEmbed embeds so you only have to paste the tweet’s URL on its own line for the import to work.
• even SEO-friendly since the tweet is here as text, not as a screenshot as so many people do.

I’ve been considering running an import plugin forever but never did because ultimately, I don’t want all my tweets on my blog. This will likely work better for me because I just have to selectively post the ones I want. Bonus: it also works with other people’s tweets when I want to quote them.

Update: The implementation you see above is in fact the one on WordPress.com, since I have now moved this blog to it.