Costolo: Interactive Tweets, Curation Tool & Downloadable Tweet Archives Coming Soon

You may have missed the news late Friday, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave a few sneak previews of the company’s road map at a meeting of the Online News Association in San Francisco. Reuters was among several sources that recapped Costolo’s appearance.

Here’s a look at some of the items that Costolo said are on Twitter’s radar:

Tweet Curation: Costolo mentioned a free tool that will let users “handpick and publish selections of tweets,” as Reuters described it — a curation tool, essentially. It sounds similar to what Storify currently offers. (Here’s an example of my Storify curations of a Twitter conversation I started many months ago.)

Twitter’s curation tool would surely include a way to embed the curated tweets on other websites/blogs, which would potentially open up more ad display space for Twitter’s advertising products.

Interactive Tweets: Costolo also promised that individual tweets would soon have more real-time and interactive features, such as live polls. “We want to migrate to a world in which the 140 characters can serve as a caption for additional functionality. We’d like that to include things like real-time data, even an application functionality.”

Downloadable Tweet Archive: Finally, Costolo also reiterated Twitter’s plans to offer users a tool for downloading their full archive of tweets. This is something that Costolo talked about earlier this year, but on Friday he was a bit more specific in saying that the tool would be available before the end of the year.

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About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.