Twitter Brings Large, Lightboxed Photos To The Web, Adds Video From Vine, YouTube

Twitter has announced a couple of updates for its web service today, designed around media sharing. There’s a new interface for viewing photos, which provides a larger look at pictures without forcing users to leave the page thanks to a lightbox overlay, accessible when you click a photo from a profile page or in search results. And video from Vine, YouTube, Vimeo, and any other partner whose movie clips show up in expanded tweets now also shows up in a user’s media gallery alongside photos.
Also new is an improved conversation view, which lets you see all of the replies to a Tweet by scrolling down. You can see it in action on this call-out from Jimmy Fallon, which also illustrates its best uses. Brands and media entities will likely love this feature, since it provides a better way to not only keep track of Twitter conversations, but also should promote more engagement and conversation branching among users.
The addition of video to media galleries is a logical next step for Twitter, especially following the launch of Vine. Truth be told, it’s likely they wanted to be able to highlight all that new user-generated content somewhere on Twitter itself, but it’s nice to see them extend that courtesy to other video partners as well