Twitter testing a couple of localised TV and Events card for iOS

The Twitter team seems to be spending a significant amount of time in the test labs this week. Not one but two new recommendation-based features have been spotted in as many days on Twitter’s mobile applications.

A TV show-based card was spotted earlier this week in the US on iOS devices. The card that occupied a huge chunk of the top of the screen was spotted on the home tab of your profile and appeared while you were scrolling through tweets. The card was titled “Trending” and contained not just the timing of the show on TV but also how many tweets were out at that point of time.

For TV shows

Twitter’s interest in live TV seems to be growing, and rightly so. It is not a secret how Twitter’s involvement in TV shows are boosting ratings and creating a buzz around it. Television shows that run on seasons in the West are regularly discussed across a huge sub-section of audiences the world over. For example, ever since the run up of the season premiere of Breaking Bad began earlier this month, the number of tweets has jumped up significantly. From the season premiere on August 11 to August 16, there have been tweets upward of 1 million, including many from celebrities like Rihanna and Adam Levine, according to Topsy Analytics.

Twitter will not only be driving discussion with this new card, it will also be opening up new vistas for advertising revenue to come crashing into the company accounts.

Just a day after the TV card was spotted, there was a new card spotted by TechCrunch that seemed to show alerts based on live events around your area. Spotted on the iOS application again, the card showcased an event that was happening less than a mile away from the device’s location and a corresponding tweet that gave more information. The event spotted in the card was one called “Girl Geek Dinner” in San Francisco. Surprisingly, someone from the meet-up organisation team said that they had not been contacted by Twitter to put them up for such a feature.

For Live Events

Just like the TV cards, the local events card could be extremely useful for driving in revenue as well as spurring on discussions on the platform. The question now is whether Facebook will take this feature out of test mode and will it roll out globally. These features will need deep local flavour and Twitter might want to consider making its roots go deeper within countries globally before attempting these.