The New Twitter: Now Featuring Video

Twitter unveiled its new Twitter.com interface today, and the big news is that it now features embedded video and images. So, rather than simply tweeting shortened URLs to video clips and pictures, online video publishers can now publish their content directly to Twitter.

The new home page features a separate section that features the images and videos, alongside the traditional tweet feed. In other words, as Peter Kafka of All Things Digital's Media Memo put it, "Twitter is a (reluctant) media company," giving users a reason beyond tweeting and following to spend time on the site—and hopefully bringing in ad revenue to support the site, which has more than 145 million users.

For the moment, video from Brightcove, Justin.TV, Twitvid, Ustream, Vimeo, and YouTube can be embedded into a Twitter feed, as well as photos from Flickr, TwitPic, and others. The new version of the site—which will be rolled out to users incrementally over the next few weeks, so don't fret if you don't see the changes right away—should be a boon to anyone who uses video to communicate for business. As Brightcove's Bob Mason wrote on the company's blog, quoting a report released by Brightcove and TubeMogul earlier this week, "internet users who find video via Twitter are more engaged with the content than uses who find video through other sources, such as display ads and search engines."

What's not clear is what this means for third-party Twitter apps like TweetDeck; the announcement of the new Twitter.com didn't address whether videos would be embeddable in those apps as well.

What's it look like? Check out the video below—jump in at about 1:05 to skip the pretty branding shots and get right to the good stuff.

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net