Delivering a consistent Twitter experience

Just over two weeks ago, I talked about more interactive experiences within expanded Tweets and how easy it is for users to discover even more great content on Twitter. The technology behind expanded Tweets — Twitter cards — gives developers and publishers a way to tell richer stories on Twitter, directly within Tweets and drive traffic back to their sites. Since launch, we’ve seen great engagement and more than doubled the number of partners that are part of expanded Tweets, and we continue to add more.

Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter. That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets. Just a few days ago, our CEO Dick Costolo said, “What you’ll see us do more and more as a platform is allow third parties to build into Twitter.” This is something we’ve been talking about for a while, and we’re looking forward to adding new ways for developers to do this.

As always, we’re hard at work building tools that make it easy for developers to build common Twitter features into their own sites in a simple and consistent way. Some examples of these tools include the Tweet Button, Follow Button, embeddable Tweets and the search widget. Ultimately, we want to make sure that the Twitter experience is straightforward and easy to understand — whether you’re on Twitter.com or elsewhere on the web.

These efforts highlight the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

We’re building tools for publishers and investing more and more in our own apps to ensure that you have a great experience everywhere you experience Twitter, no matter what device you’re using. You need to be able to see expanded Tweets and other features that make Twitter more engaging and easier to use. These are the features that bring people closer to the things they care about. These are the features that make Twitter Twitter. We’re looking forward to working with you to make Twitter even better.