We should all now be aware that Twitter is enabling its users or the other 90% of the population who don’t use Twitter, to embed tweets into pages, sites, wherever. It occurred to me that perhaps Twitter should be doing the reverse and allowing its users to embed content into tweets.
The reason I believe this is important is that Twitter is a place of links away from its site, people use desktop clients to access it, they use mobile apps, most of which aren’t owned or managed by Twitter. Therefore, infact over time does Twitter become a non-entity, simple a technology that is used to communicate rather than a destination for conversation and content. Potentially, the route out of this is to make Twitter its own content platform where users can embed content – videos, images etc and then use 140 characters to describe what it is that is being seen.
Effectively, this would work like a traditional Facebook status update allowing users to embed the content relevant to their fans and followers, so that they can view it in-situ rather than having to click away. It seems a smart move to me. The idea was something I thought of a while ago, but seems to be supported by this chart from Dan Zarella, which shows that users don’t tend to share videos as much on Twitter as they do on Facebook.
