Twitter's rise as a global communications service came in short bursts of text-only messages. But a redesign of the company's website and mobile apps announced Tuesday could generate new revenue streams by placing greater emphasis on photos and videos.
In other words, a picture is now worth 140 characters.
CEO Dick Costolo appeared on NBC-TV's "Today" show to announce that the San Francisco company has completely overhauled its iPad app, tweaked its website and revamped its iPhone and Android apps to make visual elements like photos and videos more prominent.
Costolo told the show hosts - including Ryan Seacrest and his nearly 8 million Twitter followers - that the microblogging service was responding to Twitter users who wanted better ways to express themselves.
"What we've heard over and over again from our users is they want to bring more of their personality to their profile pages," he said.
But the redesign also signals new advertising opportunities for Twitter, which has reported success with ad products like its text-based Promoted Tweets. Could there be a Promoted Photos in the works?
'A bigger canvas'
"Twitter is definitely embracing media content in this redesign, providing a bigger canvas to display pictures and video," said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst with the online research firm eMarketer.
"While I think the Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends will continue as Twitter's main ad formats, it is no big stretch to imagine that a Promoted Tweet could easily be not just words and a link, but an image or a video that plays directly and easily right within a user's news feed," she said.
The mobile apps now display photos attached to previous tweets in a horizontal bar below the latest three tweets. You can scroll through the photos with a swipe.
The redesign also creates space for a new "header photo," a picture or image that appears on top of a user's profile page on the Web or in the mobile apps. The Twitter member's profile photo appears in the middle.
Basically, this is a centerpiece picture much like the Timeline cover photo that Facebook has now pushed onto all of its members' main profile pages, even if some members didn't like that change.
The header photo gives Twitter advertisers "creative flexibility to design their own brand page," Williamson said.
New revenue stream
"Twitter is actively courting relationships with media outlets, offering to create deep integrations, such as the recent #Olympics page that Twitter developed with NBC, or ESPN's 'Show us your #GameFace' promotion around the NBA Finals earlier this year," she said.
Those relationships could generate new revenue streams for Twitter, which "spies an opportunity to glean ad dollars from businesses that are already advertising on TV and are looking to extend their campaigns into social media," she said.
Individual tweets on the iPad app expand with one touch. Twitter - which has upset its community of third-party developers by taking over more control of its platform - also made its design consistent across the website and all of the apps.
The company has 140 million active users who send 340 million tweets per day.
Read the Technology Chronicles blog online at www.blog.sfgate.com/techchron.
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