It’s been a busy week for Twitter, and the company’s SVP of Product Kevin Weil didn’t want to add any more announcements during his appearance at Recode’s Code/Mobile conference in Halfmoon Bay Wednesday. However, after carefully dodging questions about near-term product changes, Weil had some chance to talk about future platforms he’s excited about — and they’re not what you might have expected from Twitter.
Asked which platforms Twitter apps might be running on in the future, Weil made no secret of his admiration of virtual reality. “VR will be a fantastic world,” he said. Twitter hasn’t officially announced any plans to support virtual reality headsets yet, but Weil said he was convinced that the service “can work great in a VR device.”
Also on Weil’s horizon: connected cars. “It can work great in a car,” Weil said, adding that Twitter could be the only service to deliver short, quickly consumable news bits in near-realtime to connected vehicles. A natural way of consuming these would be text-to-speech synthesis, he explained.
But Weil doesn’t just want to get cars connected to Twitter. “On Twitter, you can create an account for anything you want,” said Weil — including, apparently, cats and dogs: Weil said that users on Twitter have already started to hook up all kinds of connected devices, and mentioned a user that hooked up his cat door to Twitter, which is now tweeting every time his cats enter or leave the home.
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Weil did share a few details about actual products Twitter is working on. He said that the company is looking to deliver a great experience across all devices — which will involve getting the web version of Twitter up to speed. “We are focusing on making the web experience better,” he promised.
Another area Twitter is working on is discovery of its video content, including Periscope. Said Weil: “There is so much great content on Periscope. How do we make sure who people who care about that can see it easily?”
Twitter announced Jack Dorsey as its new permanent CEO on Monday, and on Tuesday rolled out a new tweet discovery experience called Moments. On Thursday, its executives will be in New York to talk about the business side of its video properties.
