Forget the old idea Jack Dorsey had in mind when he founded Twitter through a simple sketch. The obsolete concept of 140 characters real-time sharing service so people can communicate with their friends is slowly disappearing. Instead, Twitter wants to become a leading web media provider company.
In fact, since the moment it begun displaying richer contents on Tweets it already transformed into such. What? You don’t think that’s true? Then how do you refer to a company which generates over 400 million Tweets a day, many of those includes photos and videos? A “micro-blogging service”? Yeah, and Apple is just a “phone company”…
But if that didn’t convinced you about Twitter’s real aspiring ambitions, perhaps the “micro-blogging service” latest move will. The company has announced it will allow selected leading media companies to deliver richer media content within their Tweets, beyond the possibilities which are open to everybody today (internally referred as “Twitter cards”).
Some of the happy media partners are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, TMZ, BuzzFeed, Dailymotion and Lifetime. Their Tweets will include a preview of the content they are featuring. Here’s an example for this kind of expanded Tweet which shows an image and a few lines preview from a WWE’s article (which is also a partner):
I think that inside the announcing post, by Twitter’s product team manager Michael Sippey, there’s one short sentence which basically consolidates the company’s intentions: “It’s easier than ever to discover breaking news and bylines.” I emphasized the two words- Discover and news.
Twitter wants to expand furthermore beyond the social sharing space into an enhanced content discovery service. This is also why the company improved its Discover tab capabilities couple of weeks ago. The company wishes that users will use Twitter to find new contents and news stories on the network and now it grants leading publishers better tools to distribute their contents.
These new publishers’ expanded Tweets (or “Twitter cards”) already being displayed on twitter.com and on Twitter’s mobile site (mobile.twitter.com). The company stating that soon it will also be available on mobile apps for Android and iOS.
If you also wants to become one of Twitter’s partners to highlight your site’s richer contents on Tweets, you can submit the following form (I assume that only established and authoritative publishers will be accepted).
