Twitter's announcement on Monday that it was embedding yet more multimedia sources in its preview pane completely passed me by - adding Instagram and Rdio to a roster of sites embeddable in the preview pane that already included Flickr and YouTube isn't obviously a big deal.
But it is a big deal, because with this announcement Twitter just became a multimedia broadcast channel. A single Twitter account can now be a new MTV, or Radio 1, with just the same combination of chat and music scheduled and released over the day so that as one song or music video ends (say as a link to YouTube or Rdio) the next can be scheduled into the feed, but with more interaction and more control from the listener end than any TV music channel or radio station.
I often use YouTube as a music channel when I'm working - line up a song, pick a new one when it ends. For sheer comprehensiveness YouTube is second only to BitTorrent as a source of all the music ever recorded in the world and the immediacy makes it my regular first choice of music channel. But it's the "pick a new one when it ends" bit that makes the experience more of a bother than running a Spotify playlist or listening to my own MP3s or sticking the radio on. Get someone else to pick the tracks, run it as a Twitter feed, make sure the songs run into one another properly and take suggestions from everyone listening together and there's the next music video channel. It's also potentially the next TV news channel (TV news only when there's some news to report) and next everything else channel too. Twitter's potential as a multimedia broadcast channel isn't even out of the box yet.
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