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Discover with a new lens: Twitter cards

By
Thursday, 15 November 2012

As you already know, there’s a myriad of things shared on Twitter every day, and not just 140 characters of text. There are links to breaking news stories, images from current events, and the latest activity from those you follow.

We want Discover to be the place where you find the best of that content relevant to you, even if you don’t necessarily know everyone involved. This is why we’ve introduced several improvements to Discover on twitter.com over the last few months. For example we redesigned it to show a continuous stream of Tweets with photos and links to websites, in which you can also now see Tweets from activity, based on what your network favorites. We also added new signals to better blend together all the most relevant Tweets for you, and implemented polling so you know whenever there are fresh Tweets to see.

Today we’re introducing a new version of Discover for mobile that brings many of these features to your iPhone or Android phone. For this new release, we’ve completely re-done the backend and user interface to take advantage of Twitter cards.

Using Twitter cards, you’ll now see Tweets in Discover with links to news and photos rather than the former story previews which were not interactive. And supporting Twitter cards on the backend means we can more directly improve the user experience in our native apps, too. You’ll see content from cards partners display as a previews in the stream, so that you’ll get headlines and publication names for story summaries and photo previews rather than shortened URLs.

All of this adds up to fewer taps, fewer screen views and more content for you to enjoy, faster. Of course, you can tap through to the details view for richer story summaries, bigger photos and the ability to reply, favorite or retweet Tweets.

We think this set of updates delivers the most engaging Discover experience yet, and we hope you enjoy the experience as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it.

Posted by Daniel Loreto - @DanielLoreto
Engineering Manager, Search and Relevance