MyTweetMag Blog

Twitter – Will It Turn Into A Magazine, Soon?

We have seen a lot of new features at twitter in recent time: There where some offsite-features like the web-intent-buttons, that we have implemented on mytweetmag, too. Or the new follow-button. And there have been some onsite-features like twitters own url-shortener t.co (long awaited) or the ability to read a followers stream.

But the most interesting developements took place with the shared content. A first step in this direction was the content-display on the right sidebar. And now twitter rolled out the new picture-feature, that displays all shared images in the profile-page like this (twitter includes not only the pictures shared with twitters picture-service, but also includes images from yfrog, twitpic, instagram and more):

Is this the next step to create an alternative magazine-view that displays the shared content? Several people made suggestions in this direction, among them socialbeat with a news-view and Robert Scoble, who suggested a twylah-style presentation of tweets. Another factor are the announcements (or rumors) of facebook and google+, that both prepare a magazine-view like LinkedIn recently did.

Since now, paper.li seems to be the only service, that has a remarkable number of users (2 million in january 2011), but the hype of paper.li shows, that the basic concept of alternative views works. Another point: the alternative view could make it easier to integrate adverts, even if this might produce problems with the content-sources.

What do you think? In which direction will twitter go and is the new image-feature an indicator?