Twitter Inc. said users of its microblogging service who post links to other websites will be able to see an expanded view of content from new partner sites, such as the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC.
The company, which lets users share 140-character messages, said the expanded postings will show video, photos and longer excerpts of news stories from a broader list of media partners. The service begins rolling out to website and mobile users June 13, 2012, Michael Sippey, product team director at San Francisco- based Twitter, said in a blog post.
Sample of Twitter's expanded content feature showing a tweet from the Los Angeles Times
Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner Inc said.
“This is going to cause people to stay on twitter.com, because all of the sudden you have a little bit more information. You can read the next tweet and stay on the site, being a more valuable consumer of the site.”
The service will be available on Twitter for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and for devices that use Google Inc.’s Android soon, Sippey said. The company, with more than 140 million users, expects to generate at least $1 billion in sales in 2014, two people with knowledge of the matter have said, based on advertising demand.
COMMENTARY: I love Twitter's new expanded content feature. Sort of reminds one of Google's web view during searches. But, why just offer expanded content to partner sites like The Wall Street Journal @wsj and MSNBC @msnbc, when you can offer this to other users. I would gladly pay a small fee so that my Twitter followers can view some of the content of my blog posts. This could be quite a revenue generator. The idea of showing text, image and video content right on your Twitter newstream is quite exciting.
Courtesy of an article dated June 13, 2012 appearing in Bloomberg Businessweek
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