Twitter has announced it is rolling out a new feature that should give the often-cryptic or vague nature of popular tweets a little more context, through the addition of related headlines.
In an official blog post on Monday, the social network explained how when Tweets are embedded to augment stories on other news sites, that site's story will now appear within the tweet's permalink.
The tweet's permalink page will display a list of links to all articles where that particular tweet has been embedded, with the idea being to give users easy access to the full story from their preferred news source.
The example Twitter uses to explain the feature, is the story of Jason Collins, who become the first openly gay NBA player earlier this year.
After the story broke, Collins tweeted thanks for the support he'd received, which was retweeted thousands of times. However, those unaware of the news wouldn't have known what he was actually thanking them for!

Additional context

Twitter software engineer Brian Wallerstein explained: "This year when NBA center Jason Collins became the first NBA player to publicly come out, the news traveled quickly on Twitter. As outlets like ESPN, MSNBC and sports blog Bleacher Report reported the story, they embedded @jasoncollins34's Tweet and then provided additional context that wasn't available directly on Twitter."
Twitter says publishers should see more a traffic benefit from their stories appearing in this section and it'll surely boost the number of news outlets who're embedding tweets, if for no other reason than to get the potential kickback.
However, the company has still been quite vague in explaining how this will all work and what is necessary for a tweet to qualify for these related headlines. It is rolling out the service to publishing partners at present, but hasn't confirmed what'll happen for other news outlets going forward.
It also seems fair to point out that placing these related headlines on the permalink page, rather than simply in the expanded view, seems a little awkward and out of the way. Will the headlines be highly visible there? What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.