Twitter Just Threw a Lifeline to the Content Industry
Twitter just achieved a holy trinity of snackable multimedia: you could already view Instagram pictures and YouTube videos within tweets, but now you can also listen to SoundCloud sounds without ever leaving twitter.com.
If it sounds a little Facebook-ey, it should — this, along with the other parts of the ‘expanded tweets’ announcement, shows Twitter stepping up far more explicitly than before as Facebook’s most plausible rival. Deals with the likes of SoundCloud and DailyMotion square up to the media embeds found on Facebook’s profile walls, while partnerships with The New York Times, Der Spiegel and others provide a counterpart to Facebook’s content apps.
Mathew has recently put forward some strong arguments for why the mainstream media should see Twitter as a competitor, or even a threat, but with the announcement of expanded tweets it’s worth re-evaluating what the platform has to offer, particularly in comparison to Facebook.