There’s a lot of conversation running about on blogs regarding the recent potential addition of a media share option in Twitter settings. It speaks to the potential launch of multimedia directly into Twitter – through Twitter.
The option will give you the ability to view multimedia from those that you follow, with an added option for “everyone” that is off by default. A smart move by Twitter. It’s obvious that this was coming soon, but it makes sense that such a thing would take time to implement. Consider the rapid growth of Twitter in a short span of time and the appearance of fail whales in the past – that speaks directly to a struggling architecture. If Twitter were to add multimedia capability without proper preparation, the result would likely be a lot more of those floating whales.
The question on my mind though, is how much of this implementation and sneak peek of the multimedia add on was influenced by the success of the Old Spice video campaign? Consider the number of users leaving the Twitter site to view the videos on YouTube? Imagine the ability to keep those users within Twitter while following content such as the Old Spice campaign as well as picture sharing
It also brings up the questions of whether or not Twitter will turn it into a business opp, giving companies and individuals the ability to make promotional or sponsored videos in a similar way they brought up promoted tweets. It certainly does offer some exciting potential for content marketing as a whole by creating a central hub for sharing that’s -not- Facebook.
This could potentially cause some problems for third party developers who create and code on the Twitter API in order to add more functionality. There are a number of services such as Brizzly that offer multimedia sharing in line with the live Twitter stream along with a myriad of other networks. Until the design were to pop up, there’s no way of knowing if Twitter’s version of in line multimedia will be better, worse than or parallel to a lot of the 3rd party applications currently available.
When Techcrunch queried Twitter on the addition, the response was rather simple:
“By default, you’ll only see images and videos shared by people you’re following, and reveal those by people you’re not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter”
It seems a bit on the ridiculous side to see multimedia from everyone within your buy cialis online own live stream. It’s bad enough we have to see the same recycled quotes from thousands of people – hopefully we won’t be forced to look at LOLcats all day long.
