A little over a year ago, Twitter kicked off an initiative to experiment with different ways of making tweets more interactive — a strategy that has brought us Twitter cards with previews, and shortcodes for embedding tweets elsewhere. Today, one of the latest experiments is adding more data into the mix: a list of sites linking to where a tweet has been embedded.
For now, this looks like only a limited test. The feature was first brought to our attention by Mikko Hypponen, the outspoken chief revenue officer at F-Secure, but I can’t see the links myself that he has shown in a screenshot (which I’ll show off, in a hat-tip to Twitter, with an embedded tweet instead of a screenshot:)
Has Twitter always shown where particular tweets are embedded on? pic.twitter.com/Th5y94omPZ
— Mikko Hypponen ✘ (@mikko) July 1, 2013
I asked Twitter about what is going on, and a spokesperson pointed me in the direction of this blog post noting tests of “hundreds of variations of new features and designs.”
Regardless of whether or not this feature eventually rolls out to a wider public, listing where a tweet has been used is another sign of how Twitter hopes to continue to make its platform more interactive and less lean-back.
Getting the balance to tip further in the direction of engaged users will mean that Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform to advertisers hungry to go not just where registered users are congregating, but specifically to where users are logging on, paying attention, and clicking. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that many retweets of a link doesn’t necessarily translate to traffic to a particular page. It seems that many Twitter users, lured in by the fast pace of Twitter, are happy to use it as its chief source of information as well. Offering one more bit of context — in the form of the history of the embed — could be one way of Twitter — and would be users of this service — trying to further counteract that.
You can also see how a list of links may potentially also come to include a sponsor in the mix, taking advantage of the Google-Adwords-style keyword targeting advertising that Twitter has been rolling out.
