It appears as though Twitter is in the midst of rolling out Twitter Card Summaries for more publishers. I have been seeing an increase in summaries shown in my Twitter feed from new accounts. However, the rollout seems to be ongoing. No tech blogs have covered this as far as I know. This post is to provide an update on what I’ve been seeing since I could not find any information out there.
So here is what I’ve seen so far:
Twitter.com does NOT seem to have Twitter Card support enabled for summaries (at one point they did), nor does TweetDeck. In fact, the only way to see Twitter Card Summaries right now appears to be on a mobile device and using the latest version of the Twitter app. I have confirmed that they are working on the Android version, but I am not 100% sure if the iOS version shows them.
Summaries do not appear for every tweet posted, even though the meta tags are valid and the account is supported. Some tweets end up with a summary, while others get ignored. I do not see any pattern to explain this. My best guess is that they may be having trouble crawling the URLs and grabbing the meta data in a timely manner.
Here are tweets that show with summaries on the mobile app, though I’d be surprised if they show up inline below:
Johnny Cueto / Johnny Cueto scratched from Reds’ finale with Cardinals http://t.co/xBX0qyGe #MLB #CIN
— Fantasy Sports (@FantasySP) July 15, 2012
Wes Welker not expecting a new contract http://t.co/IESE4krO
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) July 15, 2012