So far, Twitter cards have been adopted by 10,000 developers, apps and websites, leading the network to create new varieties for different types of content and add deep-linking for mobile apps.
Twitter cards allow for the expansion of 140-character tweets to include in-line previews of content contained within, such as article summaries, photos, videos, songs – and, now, mobile app deep-linking. What this means is that cards will no longer just reveal content, but also link to apps.
You can see how this works in the examples below, where a Twitter card showing an image from Path contains a link to download the app (which will bring users directly to the App Store or Google Play, depending on their operating system), while the card for Flickr gives the user the option to view the content in-app, as the Flickr app is already installed.
Twitter has also introduced three new card types in addition to the original summary, photo and media player.
App cards will display information about an app, including its rating and price, using details from the App Store or Google Play, while product cards will show an image, description and two customisable fields for further details, such as price or ratings.
And finally, gallery cards will contain a preview of a collection or album of images rather than displaying just one, making it clear to users that more than one image is contained in the link.
