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Last Night at School Committee distills hours-long public meetings into half-hour podcast episodes
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Oct. 16, 2014, 8:43 p.m.
LINK: blog.twitter.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   October 16, 2014

Back in May, we told you about how WNYC was using a Twitter Player Card to embed audio into its tweets. It was pretty nifty! But it came with a few technical hiccups:

It’s not a perfect experience. Twitter is all about the stream, scrolling through tweets — it’s not exactly optimized for having the same tweet in front of you while a 16-minute audio clip plays. (On the Twitter iOS app, for instance, the widget is only playable as a separate web page, which both is unattractive and means you can’t look at any other tweets in your stream for 16 minutes.) And I imagine many news orgs would much rather direct traffic to their website than share even more of their content on someone else’s platform.

Well, one of those problems is now solved, with a brand new Audio Card announced today.

With a single tap, the Twitter Audio Card lets you discover and listen to audio directly in your timeline on both iOS and Android devices. Throughout your listening experience, you can dock the Audio Card and keep listening as you continue to browse inside the Twitter app.

In other words, listening to an audio clip in a tweet no longer means you’re stuck staring at the same tweet for the next hour — at least if you’re using SoundCloud and are a pre-cleared partner.

So if you want to catch up on Serial (and you do, that Jay guy is super suspicious), you can listen while scrolling through your timeline:

Twitter says it plans “to make it available to more partners and creators in the future so that many more musical artists and creators will be able to share exclusive, in-the-moment audio to millions of listeners on Twitter.”

If it’s your goal to make audio more sharable — more social, more viral — a better Twitter experience is a pretty big deal.

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