Mobile app deep-linking and new Cards

Twitter Cards are being used by more than 10,000 developers, mobile apps and websites to richly represent content on Twitter, including article summaries, user-posted photos, videos, songs, and more. Today, through those Cards, we’re introducing a new way to bring people directly to your app from a Tweet, and we’re adding new types of Cards, so you can more creatively show your content on Twitter.

First, we’re introducing mobile app deep-linking in Cards –– a new feature that closes the loop between content creation, content discovery and app downloads. With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed. To enable this feature, you just need to add a new set of markup tags, explained here.

Here’s an example showing an expanded Tweet with a photo from Path, with a link directly below it, giving the user a chance to download the Path app:

Second, we’re adding new types of Twitter Cards:

• App: Show information about your app, including app name, icon, description and other details like rating or price. Just give us your ID and we will display information about your app from the App Store or Google Play.
• Product: Represent products by showing an image and description, along with up to two customizable fields that let you display more details like price or ratings.
• Gallery: Represent an album or collection of photographs via a preview of the photo gallery. This card indicates to a user that a gallery has been shared, rather than just one individual photo.

We first introduced expanded Tweets with three card types: summary, photo and player/video. Since then, we’ve heard that publishers want to be able to share different types of content. With these new card types, more publishers can show more types of content on Twitter.

Finally, with this update to Cards, we’ve fundamentally re-architected the way Cards are created and delivered. The new Cards system lays a foundation that will make it easier for us to develop more types of Cards in the future and allow for greater customization by publishers and developers. Additionally, this new system is backward compatible; if you’ve already implemented Cards, your integrations will continue to work seamlessly.

We’re excited to launch these new card capabilities with a number of great partners, including: Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio’s Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library and, of course, Vine. And we look forward to seeing many more great integrations. We introduced these features to developers at an event at Twitter HQ this evening, as a preview and to get feedback. Here are some of their initial responses:

To get started with implementing the markup for Twitter Cards, check out our new documentation pages and then test your integration against our validator tool. As always, if you have questions or feedback, please post them on our discussion forums.