Twitter Inc on Friday said it was testing a new way to use its platform for shopping by promoting “products and places” in its feeds, as it looks to boost revenue.
“We’re starting to experiment with a small number of products and places,” Twitter product manager Amaryllis Fox said in an official blog post.
“As we test, within your timeline you may see pages and collections of pages that are shared by influencers and brands,” Fox said.
The move is to expand the platform beyond tweets to pages with product information and in some cases “buy” buttons.
The revamp also allows for designated “curators” to connect with users in a manner beyond the 140-character tweet.
“We’ve invited a group of curators to share collections of some of their favorite places and things,” Fox said.
“You’ll be able to browse rich collections from influencers you care about and get more information about the products or places you find interesting,” Fox said.
This could include sponsored messages from HBO about its Game of Thrones TV series or from actress Reese Witherspoon about her Draper James line of apparel, Fox listed in her post as examples.
Other partners in the program include sportswear group Nike Inc, retailer Target Corp and the online news Web site TechCrunch.
The move comes with Twitter looking to improve growth and engagement, as it seeks a new top executive to replace Dick Costolo, who is stepping down.
Costolo was under tremendous pressure from investors to prove his worth by increasing the ranks of Twitter users and revenue brought in by the globally popular one-to-many messaging service.
Twitter’s most recent update showed it has about 300 million active users, but growth has been sluggish compared with other social networks and it has yet to show a profit.
Twitter’s share of the US$145 billion spent on digital advertising around the world this year is slightly less than 1 percent, up from just shy of 0.5 percent last year, research firm eMarketer Inc said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
RSS