The Twitter changes have been labeled as “A Better Twitter” on the company’s official blog, which announced enhancements to the service to be rolled out over the next several weeks.
Among the more significant updates to the familiar Twitter timeline is the ability to include embedded photos and videos within the Twitter feed. Users will find this additional content after clicking on an individual tweet, which then reveals a “details” pane with the new content.
The changes will allow embedded photos and videos from numerous media content sites, including Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s YouTube.
According to one report from the Seattle Times, the move is an attempt to more effectively monetize the Twitter service and enhance its appeal to advertisers by allowing them to include multimedia components in online marketing and “promoted” tweets.
But at least one security vendor rep anticipates the new Twitter features to be a venue for cybercriminals.
“The new Twitter panel features images for users to click through, which will provide yet another way for criminals to build links to malware-infected sites, hijacked or otherwise”, said Ed Rowley, senior product manager at M86 Security.
Rowley is all but certain that the new Twitter version will lead to criminal abuse, especially in its infancy. “For the first few months the changes will increasingly make users more susceptible to attacks as they get used to the ‘new’ Twitter – they won’t know what to expect and their guard will be down”, he added.
“Sadly, the combination of advertising, videos and third-party applications will, as we’ve seen on other social networking sites, be quickly targeted by criminal gangs as a means by which they can perpetrate their crimes.”
M86’s Rowley would go on to predict that exploits would affect the new Twitter format soon after its release – “within weeks, if not days”.