New iOS, Android versions of Twitter get expanded tweets

If you’re rocking an iPhone or a smartphone running Android, you might notice something a little different about Twitter after your next update.

The 140-character-or-less social network has rolled out a series of changes in the latest versions of its smartphone apps, including expanded tweets.

Anyone using the web version of Twitter will be familiar with the fact that you can expand tweets, allowing you to view videos and photos, or get previews from selected sites. According to Twitter you can now, for instance, view a Kickstarter project’s pitch video. The expanded view is only available to accounts run by Twitter’s partner sites (like Time Magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic) for now, but it seems it’s not completely automatic — when Memeburn tested a few of the accounts on the new Android version of the app, the tweets didn’t offer the expanded view. It is a gradual roll-out though, so hopefully it’ll become a more standard feature soon.

A number of the elements rolled out in Twitter’s recent updates to search and discovery have also found their way onto the app.

These include search autocomplete, which will give you more suggestion when you search for people or handles, and tweets tailored around specific events. The autocomplete isn’t perfect though — when we tried the Android version, searches for top users like Kickstarter and Etsy didn’t include the official accounts in the drop-down menu.

If you’re completely addicted to receiving notification, the new versions of Twitter also support push notifications for Tweets. What this means is that you can get notifications from people you follow whenever they send a new tweet or retweet.

If that sounds terrifying, relax, you have to turn on push notifications on a user by user basis.