Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Twitter has become much more than 140-character blurbs, and now Tweetbot is using that additional content to turn our media-rich feeds into a stream of photos and videos for users to quickly scroll through. An update released today for Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad introduces a new timeline view that displays images and videos — including content from Instagram, Vine, and YouTube — inside of the Twitter feed.

 

The display uses tweets as captions for the content, and it omits any tweets that don't include something to look at. Twitter has been working to enrich its feeds with news stories, images, and interactive content by letting developers create multimedia cards — but so far that effort hasn't exactly livened up the text-based medium on mobile devices. Tweetbot's media stream may do just that; it doesn't require users to actively open content to engage with it, and instead works by surfacing those images and videos.

 

While it may repeat tweets that have already gone by, it's an easy way to catch up on things you may have missed. The new timeline appears to display all image and video content supported on Twitter itself, as well as select outside sources, such as Instagram, that require custom support.

 

However, the view doesn't include all of the frills and shortcuts that Tweetbot's traditional feed has, though it can be quickly toggled on and off at the top of a timeline beside the app's search box. No announcement has been made about when or if the new view will be coming to the desktop, but if it's anything like the mobile-centric apps that it resembles, it could be a while....