As Twitter tries to surface more content from its network, it continues to beef up tweets and its Discover section of the site. Today, the company announced a few new features to make sure that you know the context behind a story so that you can figure out why it’s being shown to you within another big feature, Search.
Context has been the missing piece to Twitter all along and the company is trying to change that. This is of course the next evolution of its “Twitter Cards” initiative that now brings over 2,000 ways to interact with tweets.
Here’s what’s new on the site within Discover, Search and on its mobile apps:
View photos and videos first: People tell incredible stories on Twitter through photos and videos. When you search for a person, an event or a hashtag, you can now see a grid of the most relevant media above the stream of Tweets.
See headlines and photos: You can also see media instantly in your search results stream on iPhone and Android. Photos and article summaries automatically show previews to give you a bird’s eye view on what’s happening.
Understand context: About a year ago we launched tailored ranking of your search results, but until now you couldn’t see why a specific Tweet might matter more to you. Now you can see context like who favorited or retweeted right there in the Tweet.
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As you can see below, when you visit Discover and search results on Twitter, the details within the tweet, be it a link or picture, are surfaced by default. No longer do you have to “expand them”:
As Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, recently stated, you don’t have to tweet to get the full value out of Twitter itself.
It’s time to update your mobile apps, too, as I mentioned. These are sweeping changes, changes for the better, and it will hopefully help onboard new users to Twitter, as well as keep us more informed on why we found the tweet that we found.
[Photo credit: Flickr]
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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