Twitter Timeline will start showing interactive content
A few months back Twitter did a major redesign to their website allowing users to find everything more efficiently. Today Twitter announced a new update that will display interactive content on the timeline. Twitter has made partnership with several websites whose tweets will feature these dynamic content. For example, when New York Times posts a picture regarding the upcoming Olympics 2012 you can browse through their entire gallery from Twitter itself. Same goes for Videos, Content Preview’s etc.
Most of us are acquainted with the mobile version of the service on our iPhones, iPads and Android Smartphones. Previously it was annoying to use Safari everytime we clicked a URL or view images on the default website of twitpic. Although these problems are long solved the company is hoping to engage users even more with the upcoming dynamic content features.
Some of the websites that will start showing interactive tweets include WSJ, New York Times, WWE and San Fransisco Chronicle. Here is an excerpt from Twitter’s official blog regarding this major update.
FROM TWITTER’S OFFICIAL BLOG POST
Starting today, you can discover more interactive experiences inside any Tweet on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. When you expand Tweets containing links to partner websites, you can now see content previews, view images, play videos and more.
You’ve probably expanded Tweets before to play videos from YouTube or see photos from Instagram. Now, a diverse and growing group of new partners like the The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, and TIME also deliver rich content inside Tweets containing a link to those websites.
You can watch snippets from videos in Daily Motion (image above). I firmly believe that Twitter is heading in the right direction where their goal should be focused in improving user engagement in their default site. Most of us are using services like TweetDeck (owned by Twitter) or HootSuite to share your tweets. Even though the company has developed into one of the most successful social networks on the planet, it lacks pure engagement like others (Ex. Facebook). Interactive Content API for Twitter Timeline will soon be released for the public later this year allowing anyone to take advantage.
