Expanded tweets bring more content to Twitter
updated 11:18 pm EDT, Wed June 13, 2012
WSJ, Breaking News, Time delivering rich in-tweet content
In a blog post on the company site today, Twitter announced that it is rolling out a new "expanded tweet" feature. The feature will allow desktop and mobile users to explore rich content by expanding a tweet beyond the standard 140 characters. Twitter has partnered with a range of news organizations and other content providers to bring video, previews, and other media to the expanded tweet feature.
The expanded tweet feature was already available for services such as YouTube and Instagram, but today's news brings the expanded tweet function to providers like The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, and Time. With a click, users will see an expanded version showing news headlines and introductions, photos, and video clips from sites like Lifetime and Dailymotion.
The expanded tweets will contain links to continue reading or viewing the rich content. They may also contain links to follow the Twitter accounts that posted the material, reply to the content, or retweet it.
In addition to growing the range of experiences possible on the microblogging site, the new feature has the added bonus for Twitter of likely keeping users on the site by showing them the content of interest within the body of a tweet. Keeping users engaged with the site will allow Twitter to serve them more ads, which will likely bolster the reputation Twitter is trying to build for itself as the premiere ad platform for the mobile Internet.
