What’s in 140 characters?.

Holding hands at Tilden park vine.co/v/biTaEEwdq2n?1

— James Buckhouse (@buckhouse) January 24, 2013

In June last year Twitter introduced expanded tweets, allowing users to preview news stories from selected media partners. This was further expanded to allow media content such as YouTube videos, images and tracks from SoundCloud to be previewed in a tweet. 

This week Twitter announced that their embed function, which allows you to views Tweets across the web, not just in Twitter, will now be more engaging and become free-standing pieces of content. This means not only can you embed a tweet into your blog or website, but you can now fully view the content, retweet and favourite it. 

Gigaom reported this week that Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo sent a tweet that included a short video that auto-plays when you click to expand.

Then yesterday, Twitter launched Vine, a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos (6 seconds max). A move that signals Twitter’s intent to drive video sharing, while Facebook leads photosharing with its acquisition of Instagram.

Our experience of Twitter is becoming much richer with our streams filled with images, video, sound and stories.

The question this asks is – ‘what is a Tweet?’. One thing is for sure, it’s no longer just 140 characters….

[by @Here_is_Sam]