Twitter's music app is live today and can be downloaded from the App Store or used via the Web version which can be found at music.twitter.com. Based on a user's activity, the app will offer recommendations on popular tracks and emerging artists. Users will be able to locate and listen to specific artists' music from the artists' profiles, as well as tweet the songs directly from the app. Twitter #music songs are sourced from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio, but the default application to preview songs is iTunes. To hear full tracks via Spotify or Rdio, subscribers must log into their Spotify or R [...]

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Good news for brands, marketers and anyone with a highly visual or image-based Twitter presence: The "view all" option for Media Galleries is showing again on Twitter profile pages. Visit any Twitter profile and you should see the "View all photo and videos" link below the most recent six images/videos that the user has tweeted or retweeted. Here's an example from @gap (The Gap): The "view all" option was present when Twitter launched galleries back in the summer of 2011, but it curiously disappeared sometime this past winter. When the link went away, the only way to see an accoun [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Accounts & Profiles | Twitter: User Interface

With a packed house in Twitter's employee cafeteria Tuesday night, the company announced an important expansion of "Twitter Cards" -- the technology that adds rich content inside a tweet. These were first called expanded tweets when Twitter launched the feature in June 2012. About four months later, Twitter announced that it already had more than 2,000 partners using the content-rich tweets. Last night, Twitter told developers that they eventually want to have hundreds of different card types. But for now, there are three new types of Twitter Cards: App, Product and Gallery. Those join t [...]

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To date, Twitter has owned the market on real-time, crowd-sourced information. Whether it's during the Super Bowl, Television, or cultural events -- users flock to Twitter (and hashtags) to see what's happening. Our own Danny Sullivan summed up the current Facebook/Twitter experience masterfully in the article "For Social Media Viewing, Twitter Is Live TV, Facebook Is DVR." Well, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Facebook wants out of its DVR status and in on the hashtag. Sure both Google+ and Instagram support tags, but Facebook has typically stayed far away from th [...]

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Little Twitter is growing up, today announcing it will offer an advertising API for its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products, a development allowing marketers to buy and optimize Twitter ads alongside their other media buying. The company has been testing the system for the last month or so, with beta partners Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, TBG Digital and SHIFT. "With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale," wrote April Underwood, Twitter's prod [...]

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Popular Twitter client Tweetdeck, just became even more powerful as a Twitter tool with new column filters. Tweetdeck rose to popularity, thanks, in part, to columns that allowed users to customize content by hashtag, lists, users and message types. As of today, columns can do even more with new Tweet filtering options that allow users to include/exclude words, media and even retweets.   The new filters can be accessed by clicking on the edit button at the top right of the column and have four main filtering options: Showing - This can be switched from showing - All Tweets, Tw [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter: User Interface

In an era when brands are flocking to Pinterest because of the opportunity it provides for high-quality visual marketing, and Instagram is taking steps to be more attractive to its growing brand users, Twitter has made a curious decision that essentially takes away similar visual marketing opportunities on its platform. I'm talking about those media galleries that were in the news this week. They now show both photos and videos, but they're a lot less useful than they were both for brands and regular Twitter users. Here's why: sometime in the last few months, Twitter removed the ability [...]

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Twitter announced a couple changes to its interface today, the most interesting of which (in my opinion) is the addition of videos to media galleries. Media galleries were originally called User Galleries when they rolled out in Summer 2011. They show(ed) the 100 most recent photos that a user shared or retweeted. Twitter says videos from Vine, YouTube, Vimeo and other sources whose videos show in expanded tweets will show up in Media Galleries now. Brands that are actively tweeting quality images, or already adopting Vine, should welcome the expanded galleries as a place to collect more [...]

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You'll be excused if you think the social media platform battles are starting to look like something you'd see on Romper Room. The latest step in this back-and-forth is Instagram's decision to prevent its images from showing properly on Twitter's website and clients. At the LeWeb conference today, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed the move and said that his company plans to fully prevent Instagram images from being embedded on Twitter. Here's how he's quoted on the New York Times' Bits blog: We've decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram Web [...]

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed that the company is testing a change in its user interface that would replace the "heavyweight" Favorite button with "lightweight" options such as "Star" or "Like." According to V3.co.uk, Costolo told the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference yesterday that Twitter is thinking a change of terminology might increase engagement with the feature. "We're testing some alternative terms for favourite. Favourite feels a little bit too heavy weight so we're testing some lighter weight terms. Engagement begets engagement. The lighter weight and mor [...]

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Twitter's interactive/expanded tweet product is growing. The company says that it now has more than 2,000 partners taking advantage of the ability to include various media in tweets via what are called Twitter Cards. When the expanded tweets product launched this summer, Twitter had a relatively small group of participating publishers like TIME magazine, the Wall Street Journal, WWE wrestling and TMZ. Today the list has expanded with groups like The Weather Channel, shopping site TopFloor, Fandango and the music app Soundcloud, which includes song previews and more in its interactive twe [...]

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If you've been one of the many users turned off by the dark, drab TweetDeck look, you're in luck. Twitter has released a new version of TweetDeck that mimics the web version of Twitter with a lighter, cleaner look. If you've been one of the avid users who've loved the dark look, no worries. A toggable switch will let you continue in your dark ways. Twitter bought TweetDeck back in May of 2011 and the intrinsicly-Twitter redesign ha been a long time coming. Another welcomed change for many users will be the ability to change font sizes. Now users can select from Small (13pt), Medium (1 [...]

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In May Twitter had changed the Discovery tab to include more personalization on content discovery. That change was an improvement, but focused on top stories & content, not necessarily Tweets. The new change is geared more to popular Tweets than just news articles. When a user now clicks on the Discovery tab, they see "Tweets, What's happening now, tailored for you."  All of the selected Tweets auto-display images and article data which is a nice touch. As an irregular Twitter user, this is a big improvement. I can jump on, check the Discovery tab and see what people are saying -- [...]

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You may have missed the news late Friday, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave a few sneak previews of the company's road map at a meeting of the Online News Association in San Francisco. Reuters was among several sources that recapped Costolo's appearance. Here's a look at some of the items that Costolo said are on Twitter's radar: Tweet Curation: Costolo mentioned a free tool that will let users "handpick and publish selections of tweets," as Reuters described it -- a curation tool, essentially. It sounds similar to what Storify currently offers. (Here's an example of my Storify curations [...]

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In case you missed the big announcement on the Today Show yesterday morning, Twitter has updated profiles with a new Timeline-like header photo that will appear across platforms, transitioning the social channel to become more visual and image-centric. How To Update Your Twitter Profile Header There isn't an obvious "update" on your profile, though, you'll need to go into your account settings and make these changes yourself (take it from someone who waited an hour to see if the roll out would "hit" my account.) To get the new look, you'll need to log in, go to the gear icon in the top right [...]

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In an effort to create a uniform, homogeneous environment, Twitter has yanked Tweet data that shows the particular Twitter client used to post a Tweet. Traditionally, users could view a Tweet on the web and look to the "via" tag to see how the Tweet was posted. The following shows the old view (above) and the new view (below): This new changes helps to make the Twitter experience more uniform, as Tweets aren't coming in from a variety of sources and devices. However, this will remove some visibility for the apps/clients that are being used. Traditionally, a user could click on th [...]

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After an extended period of time letting the Tweetdeck sit stagnant, Twitter is enhancing the functionality and usability of the popular app.  In March Twitter added list management, actvities and editable Retweets.  Today Tweetdeck is getting an enhanced navigation, easier response items and  better column management. Columns will be laid out in one seamless row where users can simply click to view more to the left or right.  Clicking on the new arrows will allow users to view several columns at a time.  If you ever want to view all columns, simply click on the columns button at t [...]

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Tweets are now more interactive with the addition of Twitter's "Expanded Tweets." The new functionality allows any Tweet that contains links to partner websites the ability to pull images, preview content, play videos and more, directly from the tweet: Another nice feature of Expanded Tweets is the mobile support. Users on the Twitter mobile client will see the Expanded Tweet just as if they were viewing on the web. Some of the partner sites included are: The New York Times The Wall Street Journal MSNBC's Breaking News TIME The San Francisco Chronicle BuzzFeed TMZ [...]

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While Twitter's performance is leaps and bounds above their previous "fail whale" days, it will only get faster.  In a blog post yesterday, the Twitter engineering team announced that they have reviewed their entire technology stack in a mission to optimize the site's speed. With the "New Twitter" the UI rendering occurred via JavaScript on users' browsers on both web and mobile interfaces.  With recent changes, the rendering has been moved back to the server.  This means that initial load times have been dropped to 1/5th of what they were, or an 80% drop. One item that you will s [...]

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No smartphone? No problem, at least not when it comes to using Twitter on the go. The company has announced an update to its mobile web version at mobile.twitter.com that makes it more uniformly consistent with how smartphone users experience Twitter. It has the same four icon/button menu -- Home, @mentions, Connect (#) and Profile -- that you're already familiar with, and Twitter says its new mobile version is "fast, like a native mobile app; it uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous iteration." That'll be good news for Twitter users in countries where smartphone penetration [...]

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