Today at a developer meetup at Twitter, the company demoed some new technology that will see its existing ‘Cards’ feature to allow for three new capabilities: mobile app linking, photo galleries, and product information, such as price.
Regarding app linking, inside of the updated cards, connections to mobile applications can be included. On the company’s developer website, it cites the following example as indicative of what the new features can allow:
If the user has the app in question, a link to open the application itself will be delivered instead of install prompt. This feature is for mobile application users on iOS and Android only; this is sensible as to link to mobile applications in a desktop environment would be asinine.
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According to Twitter, the following companies are the first partners of the mobile app linking service: “Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio’s Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library [and] Vine.”
The addition of this sort of mobile app linking feature isn’t new, as our own Ken Yeung noted, having been pioneered at least by Facebook and Google+ before Twitter.
Photo galleries will allow for the easy insertion of a few images into a tweeted Card:
Twitter initially had but three types of cards; with the addition of mobile app Cards, photo gallery Cards, and product Cards brings that figure to six. Naturally, these new Card varieties extend the types and depth of information that can be embedded in a single tweet.
Twitter is no longer a simple service by which 140 characters are shipped at a time; instead the company is bending its own set boundaries to allow for more data to be squeezed into every short message, even as character limits remain in place.
According to the company, 10,000 partner “developers, mobile apps, and websites.” That figure will certainly grow following the addition of today’s new Card varieties. Even more, the company claims that a rebuild of Card architecture will allow it to “make it easier […] to develop more types of Cards in the future.”
This is just the beginning of the Card story. Expect more, and expect it soon.
Top Image Credit: Shawn Campbell
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