Questions from the Twitter Cards Google Hangout - July 22, 2014

[jbulava]

We had a handful of questions that we did not get to during the Hangout. These questions and their answers can be found here.

And you can find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uarWbgBLRso

[jbulava]

Anton (+5)
Are Twitter cards strictly for static content? Are they not appropriate for dynamically created content?

The Twitterbot will cache a card for 7 days before crawling the URL again for new content. As more dynamic use cases have come up recently, we are certainly aware that a lower cache time is important to our developers and is an improvement we are investigating.

[jbulava]

Gareth (+4)
Those meta tags can add a significant number of bytes to the page header, which unnecessarily impacts users visiting our sites via 3G or other slow networks. Can we do user agent sniffing to deliver those tags only to Twitter?

Absolutely! We should have mentioned this. Many developers check for the Twitterbot and return a response consisting of only meta tags when they see this user agent.

[jbulava]

Ryan (+1)
Have you seen deweybird.com Jon?

We have and we know the developers well!

[jbulava]

Donald (+2)
Is approval for player cards limited to audio and video players?

Yes, that’s the intended use case for Player Cards. If you have a specific use case that you’d like to suggest or aren’t sure if it fits into this category, feel free to mention it here or submit the Card via the validator. The team that reviews Player Cards should be able to give you recommendations to create the best user experience for Twitter.

[jbulava]

Rumi (+2)
Any tips on rendering the Twitter cards when we receive them via Twitter APIs (REST or Streaming). Any best practices? How/what can be customized in terms of content or presentation?

Cards are rendered within all web and mobile Twitter clients. We do not currently expose Twitter Cards content to the REST and Streaming APIs.

[jbulava]

Owen (+2)
Hey guys, are there plans to enable the user to pre-select which portion of a photo appears within preview? At present, there’s some guesswork around dimensions (1010x506 is my go-to, btw)

Unfortunately, pre-selection does not easily fit into the cards workflow since we crawl for your card information. We are always open to suggestions though. We should certainly include (in the Photo Card documentation) how preview images are created and cropped. I’ll reach out to engineering team for this information.

That being said, the Creative Cards available on the Twitter Ads Platform provide more control to resize and crop images for Cards as these are created within a UI.

[jbulava]

Taengoo (+1)
Since cards from non-whitelisted domains do not auto-expand/preview in the timeline, I still attach an image to the tweet to encourage engagement. Are there plans to give photo cards visibility that is similar to attached media?

Auto-expansion applies to all pic.twitter.com and vine.com URLs. Although the photo card does not have this functionality, we are always looking to improve our user experience and we’ve definitely heard from developers that this would be a great next improvement.

[jbulava]

Donald (+1)
Are website cards and Lead Generation Card only available for promoted tweets?

As long as you have access to Twitter Ads in your country, you can sign in and access those Cards from the Creatives tab. And you can start building those cards without any campaigns associated to them.

[niall]