We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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This isn’t a new idea, but it was revitalized by Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos in early April, who suggested people pick a teen and find out what kids are up to on Twitter these days. The hashtag took off, and if you haven’t searched for the results recently, you should.

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen—
Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

#followateen update 2: he's upset about being placed into remedial english next semester. He also spelled remedial wrong. Good luck, teen!—
Brandon (@BrandonTCX8) December 30, 2011

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?—
Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

(Sometimes the teens even catch on.)

My teen says she's pretty sure my deer tweet is about her, and she's pretty sure she doesn't know me. #followateen—
Meaghan O'Connell (@meaghano) April 13, 2013

Aside from making fun of random teenagers, the growth of the hashtag can actually teach us a good deal about teens, social media, and our weird relationships with the internet. Here are five things I actually learned from #followateen:

Life is a lot harder for teenagers in 2013

When Timeline came out last year, I went back and deleted a lot of old wall posts, and I was shocked by the volume of bad photos and inane thoughts my friends and I posted. (i.e., “Do you have a copy of the math homework?” or “OMG lacrosse practice was so hard today.”) At the time, I thought that teenagers had probably learned from my generation’s early adoption and over-sharing, and that today’s teens had stopped posting as many inane, personal moments online. Surely they’d come to realize that everything they post on the internet is public and searchable forever.

Hahahaha. No.

Scrolling through posts from teens on Twitter this week, it became clear that they have not stopped posting personal, intimate details of their lives online for anyone to search, and if anything, they’re posting even more. As someone who went through high school missing one of my front teeth (don’t ask), I cringe for the future selves of these teens who will wish they’d posted a little less for the public to see. And in my (pretty recent) day, we didn’t even have Instagram or Tumblr.

PROMMMMM TOMORROWWW CANTTT WAITTTTT 😁😘😍😙—
May29th™ (@TiiAHBHOO) May 03, 2013

I have 6 school days left in my senior year and I just got my first detention ever for leaving gym class early. Ha. #whatajoke—
ʝαє∂єи вαяℓσω (@jaebarlow) May 03, 2013

im grounded, so i guess i will just make some vines—
jason orcutt (@jason_orcutt) May 03, 2013

#followateen is the future

You can lament those selfies and poor grammar on Twitter all you want, but how teens are using social media like Twitter today is likely going to have an impact on what we’ll all be using ten years from now. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are struggling to build advertising networks and continue to add new users, but data has shown that many of those new users are actually coming from older generations, as kids are being drawn to new sites like Snapchat, Vine, Wanelo, Tumblr, and Instagram.

You and I don’t use Twitter the same way

When I log on Twitter, I find people talking about the latest tech news, debating the proper way to report corrections to tweets, and LOLing at internet trends like #followateen. I bet the average age of the people I follow is 30. But searching for teen-esque hashtags and scrolling through the resulting posts was an incredible reminder that Twitter is entirely what you make of it, and that my experience on the network probably looks nothing like yours.

It’s easy to forget when everyone becomes so accustomed to his or her personal feed that this is true. I would guess that there’s far less disparity in people’s different Facebook and Instagram experiences, because those social networks are much more dictated by the design of the sites and the types of content people can post. But on Twitter, you create your own adventure.

Twitter is totally creepy, whether or not you #followateen

Yes, it can be super creepy to #followateen on Twitter and treat that teen like a zoo specimen for observation. But Helena Fitzgerald of The New Inquiry points out that, really, following a teen and reporting back on the hilariousness of their lives is no different than most of our Twitter relationships, where we follow people and retweet them and view their tweets as news; especially when most of them never follow us back. Humans are curious about other people by nature, and Twitter plays up that curiosity in ways that can be creepy but also completely entertaining.

Stupidity on the internet is certainly not confined to kids

Lest the adults get too full of themselves and their superiority over the teens, the emergence of the #followanadult hashtag on Friday serves as incredible reminder that adults can be just as predictable and boring online as the teens are.

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?—
Rookie (@RookieMag) May 03, 2013

#followanadult my adult is posting articles about divorce, punctuated by wiz khalifa lyrics.—
m.h. (@zefzefmeredeath) May 03, 2013

my adult gets a text, email and phone call from Walgreens when his prescription is ready. He thinks this may be overkill. #followanadult—
shannon (@shansperl) May 03, 2013

@tavitulle My adult's corporate employer is planning an office-wide Harlem Shake parody. #followanadult—
Kirsten Reach (@KirstenReach) May 03, 2013

my adult is out of kombucha #followanadult—
Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 03, 2013

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These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

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The company’s homepage now explains that the service is shutting down, and what that means for users:

“We will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team. There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter.”

We Are Hunted declined to explain further what that venture with Twitter might be, and Twitter has not yet responded with any comment on the acquisition.

But Twitter is clearly focused on building out multimedia apps and content, with both the improvement of Twitter cards earlier this month, advertising deals focused around video content, and launch of the standalone video app Vine earlier this year.

Update at 8:00 PM: Twitter has confirmed the acquisition in a tweet congratulating the company, and Mike Isaac at AllThingsD is now reporting that Twitter is set to launch the independent music app on Friday.

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Twitter announced updates to its Twitter Cards at a developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and the most interesting news is that tweets will now allow for third-party developers to include download links within those tweets, turning Twitter into more of an app discovery platform and showing users where content is coming from.

So for instance, if your friend posts a photo to the social network Path and cross-posts that photo to Twitter, and if you don’t already have Path installed, you’ll see a link where you can go download Path. And if you do have Path installed, the link can serve as a deep link that will allow you to head directly to the content in that app.

It might seem slightly counterintuitive for Twitter — why would the company want to send you elsewhere? But clearly Twitter has realized that people respond positively to visual, richer content within tweets, like the short basketball clips embedded in March Madness tweets. So if Twitter becomes a more interesting place, that’s obviously a win for the company.

Mike Isaac wrote for AllThingsD last week that the developer event would revolve around cards, and explained why the cards matter so much for the future of Twitter’s business. Facebook has built up its third-party developer community in recent years, and while Twitter struggled to work with developers last summer over API guidelines, this could be a new way for the company to build a more positive ecosystem around its product.

The updates to Cards also come with some changes to the types of content that can be tweeted out, including app descriptions, product details, and galleries, to show that more than one photo is being shared. The blog post from Twitter explained:

“We first introduced expanded Tweets with three card types: summary, photo and player/video. Since then, we’ve heard that publishers want to be able to share different types of content. With these new card types, more publishers can show more types of content on Twitter.

Finally, with this update to Cards, we’ve fundamentally re-architected the way Cards are created and delivered. The new Cards system lays a foundation that will make it easier for us to develop more types of Cards in the future and allow for greater customization by publishers and developers. Additionally, this new system is backward compatible; if you’ve already implemented Cards, your integrations will continue to work seamlessly.”

Twitter announced that its first partners for this roll-out include Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio’s Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library and Vine.

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Prince’s record label NPG records has filed a DMCA copyright complaint with Twitter over a series of videos containing Prince’s content that were posted to Vine, Twitter’s newest video platform, as The Next Web first reported.

The complaint asks Twitter to remove the eight video clips from Vine that contain Prince’s material. Twitter has not yet responded with any comment.

“These are unauthorized recordings and are unauthorized synchronizations. As such, I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted work described above is not authorized by the copyright owner (or by a third party who is legally entitled to do so on behalf of the copyright owner) and is not otherwise permitted by law. I hereby confirm that I believe the tracks identified in this email infringe my copyright.

We hereby request that you immediately remove our content 8 video clips from the vine.co platform, as accessible via the above links, as well as all other occurrences on the vine.co platform.”

While it’s unclear how much of an effect six-second videos might have on Prince’s music career, it’s somewhat of a validation for Twitter that serious musicians and celebrities would consider Vine a threat in terms of how media is distributed online. Twitter launched Vine back in January, allowing users to share short video clips and tweet them to the network, and you can now embed Vine videos on the web. It’s still uncertain how many users are sharing videos through Vine or how the startup will fit within Twitter’s ecosystem.

But it’s fair to say that if Prince has concerns about Vine, the rest of us should keep an eye on it too.

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Dalton Caldwell talks about his App.net project on March 9 in Austin at SXSW.

“It’s important to question assumptions about why things are the way they are,” the entrepreneur said Saturday in Austin at SXSW to the crowd in his typically passionate style.

And Caldwell knows the road less traveled. After previous ventures in both an ad-supported music startup and a photo-sharing site, he launched App.net, a paid developer platform (that was commonly but mistakenly referred to as the “paid Twitter”) last summer to much fanfare.

Caldwell has been working since then to make something out of his pledge to grow a network where people pay for — and own — their data. “I think that you are what you eat,” he said.

But just a few weeks ago, Caldwell surprised some people when he announced a free tier to App.net, which seemed at first antithetical to the idea behind the service. But Caldwell pointed to business models for Github or Dropbox and said a freemium tier can be highly profitable when done right.

“I don’t think people will use software because they think it’s good for them, or that it’s better,” he said. “But my approach is that we will make better software that people will want to use.”

Caldwell said immediately before launching the free tier App.net had 32,000 paid members, and now just a few weeks later, they’re at 51,000 total users, both paid and free, which he thinks has big implications for convincing developers to build for the platform.

While it was initially called a “paid Twitter” by a good number of people, Caldwell has repeatedly emphasized that App.net is actually a paid developer network that can serve as a platform for a lot of different apps (think Amazon web services or the plumbing and infrastructure people build their houses on.) Some developers have questioned whether they’d ever use those services if the average user membership to App.net itself is so low (just imagine the contrast with Twitter’s 200 million active users). But if a freemium tier can attract some more people, it could grow the audience and thus give credence to Caldwell’s idea that social networks should find a way to support developers and do right by the user.

“Like, if Vine users can’t find friends with Facebook, that sucks. It’s stupid. It’s only to protect business model interests,” he said, of Twitter’s decision to protect its social graph. But then again, Caldwell knows that the path for Twitter, which is ad-supported, is not easy.

Someone asked how Caldwell would have negotiated Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers this summer if he himself were a Twitter employee. Would he have done things differently?

“I’m not sure I could do anything different if I were in his shoes,” he said.

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Skype is reportedly testing video messaging options for mobile users today. The service would let people leave a video-based message for their friends. I can see a whole new variant on the “wish-you-were-here” picture messages I send that could involve panoramic views or the local soundscape (good for concerts and birdcalls, bad for when I’m in New York City).

A few weeks ago, Twitter launched Vine, to let people record 6-second videos and post them easily from their mobile, and Facebook is testing a voice messaging application that will let you leave a voice-based message for friends from Facebook. While the Facebook example isn’t video-based it drives home the larger point: Our web interactions are pushing forward to mirror our real-world interactions as much as possible, which means that our bandwidth demands and our mobile devices need to keep up.

On the mobile device side, we’re doing fine. Processing, cameras and microphones on smartphones are enabling us to record quality videos, voice and images. In the case of images we even have enough processing power for some editing. But on the bandwidth side, it’s unclear if we’re going to have the capability to share our efforts. That’s why on the wireless and wireline side we need to keep adding capacity and lowering costs. Conducting a video call today sucks up a lot of bandwidth, but there are ways to reduce the impact on the network and drive down costs for consumers and the operators.

When I look at the increasingly visual nature of the web and the influx of video options for communication I realize that we can finally escape the limits that technology has imposed on how we communicate over long distances. Letter writing, postcards, voice calls and even static web pages are poor substitutes when you want to share an experience with someone, and they are substitutes that are driven by the limits of the technology at the time. Many of those limits are no longer there.

Adapting to this will require us to ditch centuries of habits and preferences, but it opens up much higher quality ways for people to communicate. We will still drag these other forms of communication into our video-based future but we’ll be able to choose when an email makes the most sense or when we’d rather stick with voice.

As I scroll down the pages of an online catalog, I am grateful that I have the bandwidth at home to load pictures quickly so I can see the details in the product. I can’t wait for the ability to see things in 3D — or even set up a quick video call with someone who is near the product for a closer look.

I assume my six-year-old daughter — who refuses to take phone calls from people she loves unless there’s a video component — will resort to voice only for strangers and business-related conversations. Getting to that point means more work needs to be done to seamlessly integrate the options available to people much like Apple has done with FaceTime on its platform, and then to spread that to all platforms.

Companies like Skype, BlueJeans Networks, Polycom, and countless others are all trying to make this real as are the people pushing for the WebRTC standards. Right now it’s a mish-mash of standards, platforms and options, but video will coalesce into something that as simple as picking up a phone or mailing a letter is today.

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Vine now has a 17+ age rating and a warning that the app may contain mature content, and it also has a new tool to report inappropriate content or individual users as part of an update first spotted by The Verge. The changes were part of an app update.

The situation was handled far differently for 500px. The photography app, which had been available for download on the App Store for several years, was given a warning from Apple during a review of one of the app’s updates that there was possible pornographic content. 500px said they would look for and remove the content, but then the app was removed from the App Store altogether, and Apple claimed it received complaints of pornography involving children.

Though 500px maintains it never found and was never show examples of images involving children, 500px’s app was put back into the App Store after working with Apple over a few days to institute the company’s requested changes. Those adjustments included stricter search filters for images containing nudity and — like what Twitter added to Vine — a 17+ rating on it and a user reporting tool.

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As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

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