Twitter Inc (TWTR) Tweets Across Web And On Mobile Are About To Look A Lot Different

SAN FRANCISCO -- Journalists have been in bed with Twitter for years now. On Twitter’s ninth birthday in March, CEO Jack Dorsey credited with journalists with pushing Twitter’s early growth and convincing others of its value in a tweet-storm.

Now, Twitter has created two new tools, called Twitter Curator and Twitter Publish, that help journalists use tweets to craft stories. Twitter Curator provides a homepage for creators to find, save and later publish tweets. That tools connect with third-party services like Dataminr and TweetDeck and goes beyond just searching within Twitter.com. Twitter Publish now lets users create new customizable Identification codes for embedding these tweets on a Website’s own publishing system.

"We found out from our publishing partners that almost everyone is sitting there struggling to find the tweet and copy and paste every tweet into the CMS. CMS's suck," Twitter product manager Michael Ducker told IBTimes.

The new site, created by Twitter and accessible through a Twitter log-in, allows creators to generate one single code for showing a list of tweets and also a homepage for updating the content in real time. These can also be saved and altered on the Twitter site rather than tweaked via several lines of code.

A Collection on Twitter

“We identified where all the friction points are. There’s no one place that describes all our products. Now Twitter Publish is the new home,” Ducker said.

For the publisher, it's a new creation tool. For the reader, it's a new display. Tweets on sites will soon look different. No longer are individual tweets posted as a listical on BuzzFeed or within a news story on IBT limited to embed codes of single text-based tweets or videos. Instead, Twitter Publish offers new layouts such as a grid view.

Tweets are “the modern day super pull-quote,” Prashant Sridharan, Twitter’s global director of developer and platform relations, told IBT. “I just love the articles where it’s random people tweeting about things. Every single one of those people have a voice. When all those voices come together, those stories come together.”

Twitter’s update follows in company’s new pitch for its power beyond having 316 million monthly active users but also touting at least 1 billion views each day of tweets embedded across the web.

Twitter has also now casted itself as a storyteller and curator itself. The company released the “Project Lightning” initiative, now known as the “Moments” product, last month that collects and stitches together tweets, photos, videos, Vines and GIFs around particular events. Twitter has hired a team of human curators, under the direction of former New York Times editor-at-large Marcus Mabry.

“We’re breaking all the norms of what a tweet looks like. It’s not just the Twitter bird and confusing things like hashtags and handles. They’re media heavy,” Ducker said.