What is Twitter really up to with 'Blackbird Pie'?

Originally published in Social Media Today

Following a bit of online buzz yesterday around embeddable Twitter quotes for online publishers, Twitter Media made it official today by unveiling a new tool dubbed 'Blackbird Pie'.

On first blush the tool looks like it will be, as advertised, a nice addition for online publishers.

As the blog post says "it's a pain to take screen grabs of Tweets" and then publish them online. I wholeheartedly agree. Enter Blackbird Pie. For online publishers, the process will be quite familiar--here's how it works.

Go to the site, enter a Twitter URL into the box and click "Bake It". You're then presented with a preview of how the embedded Tweet will display on your website or blog as well as the embed code for inserting it. Pretty straightforward and pretty slick--see the screenshot below for an example.

That's where things get intriguing.

Imagine thousands of web publishers and bloggers begin inserting specific Tweet URLs into Blackbird Pie. When that happens, Twitter will immediately start collecting some very interesting data.

I bet we see Twitter starting to prominently display lists of the most quoted Tweeters--both overall and from specific categories (i.e. technology, sports, entertainment). We may even start to see which Twitter users are 'trending' in terms of their quotability. Essentially, Blackbird Pie may function similarly to how hashtags do now.

What do you think? Have any theories on other ways Twitter may utilize Blackbird Pie?