Twitter revamps timeline; highlights photos, videos
Twitter was born in 2006 as a stream of SMS text messages. Before going public in 2013, it's now reveling in images.
The
company has tweaked its design to favor image- and video-sharing by
showing visual media directly within the Twitter timeline. Users
previously had to click on a tweet to view the embedded multimedia.
Although
the change does not affect the basic mechanics of how content is
shared, it will likely alter the feel of Twitter, which long clung to
its roots as an 140-character, text-based service invented in an era
before smartphones existed.
As Twitter prepares
to go public in a matter of weeks, the change will also present
Twitter's advertisers with more opportunities to get attention-grabbing
ads in front of users - leading to more revenue for the company.
Twitter has long acknowledged that pictures and video are some of the most often shared content in social media.
The
most re-circulated tweet in Twitter history, for instance, was a
picture sentPresident Obama's account on Election Night in 2012. Three
words - "Four more years" - captioned a photo of Barack and Michelle
Obama embracing the moment the president declared victory.
"These
rich Tweets can bring your followers closer to what's happening, and
make them feelthey are right there with you," Michael Sippey, Twitter's
vice president of product, said in a short blog post Tuesday. "We want
to make it easier for everyone to experience those moments on Twitter."
Twitter's
changes served up another reminder that social media remains one of the
most hotly contested arenas in the technology sector.
Facebook
Inc made changes to its layout and newsfeed algorithms this year to
more heavily promote visual content. It also acquired Instagram for $1
billion last year and has recently begun showing ads on the
picture-heavy social network.
Earlier on
Tuesday, Google Inc unveiled new features that let users publish slick
home videos to its Google+ social network - a veiled assault on
Twitter's Vine app and Facebook's Instagram, which support
video-sharing.
Twitter's new look immediately
drew mixed reactionssome of the tech digerati and early adopters,
including many who predicted the more visual look would appeal to
newcomers who might find Twitter's stream of rolling text confusing.
But
Mathew Ingram, a writer at GigaOm, said Twitter was "in danger of
sufferingwhat some call the MySpace effect (an excess of ads and gaudy
images)" precisely because Twitter's old guard was accustomed to
streamlined text.
"Will the number of enthusiastic advertisers make up for the number of irritated and/or overwhelmed users?" Ingram wrote.
Others,Aaron
Levie, the wise-cracking chief executive of file-sharing company Box,
took advantage of the new design to simply point out how different
Twitter felt.
Levie tweeted: "People on Twitter
right now." In the same tweet, he appended a screenshot of twoactersthe
film Jurassic Park, their jaws slack with astonishment.
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