Twitter Launches Expanded Tweets, Letting You Read News, Check Out Images, And Watch Video Inline

On the Twitter blog today, the company announced a new way that users will be able to get access to an expanded array of content from partners. The latest new innovation, Expanded Tweets, will let users check out content directly from certain partners, without having to leave its web site.

News partners like the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC’s Breaking News, San Francisco Chronicle, Der Speigel, and TIME will now let users see more content directly within their Tweets, without having to click through to their websites. When you expand a news-based Tweet, for example, Twitter’s Expanded Tweets will provide a preview of the headline and introduction, as well as the Twitter accounts of the publisher and writer. They can then click through to read the article, follow news accounts, reply or retweet within the Twitter page itself.

It’s not just online news publishers or text that Twitter is targeting with Expanded Tweets. Users will also be able to view images and video directly within the Tweet. Partners that Twitter named for that capability include WWE, BuzzFeed, and TMZ on the image side, and BET, Lifetime, and Dailymotion for video.

For now the capability is only available through the Twitter website and mobile web. But Twitter product manager Michael Sippey wrote on the Twitter blog that users will soon have the same inline viewing capabilities available through native apps for iPhone and Android.