Twitter has been steadily rolling out upgrades and new features this past year, and the next one is a pretty cool feature that should be quite useful to most Twitter users. The newest feature is expanded Tweets, more interactive features inside tweets themselves. At first expanded Tweets are being rolled out on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, but will be expanded to Twitter for iPhone and Android soon. Let’s take a look at this new feature.

First of all, there have been some interactive experiences inside tweets already such as being able to watch youtube videos embedded in tweets and photos from the various photo sharing services. But now Twitter is announcing partners such as The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and The New York Times, just to name a few, that will be deliver content inside your Twitter timeline. When clicking on a tweet by one of these partners, you can get previews of articles, introductions, exclusive photos and images, and even view some videos. Within the expanded tweets you’ll also find the usual functionality such as reading the full article, following the Twitter account, replying, retweeting or marking the Tweet as a favorite.

Is this a good thing? Twitter has always been known for giving you the content and headlines you want in 140 characters or less. With expanded Tweets, is Twitter moving away from that model? Is this a huge timesaver, helping Twitter users by giving them expanded previews and extra content that they normally would have had to leave the site (Twitter) to view. Since expanded Tweets are just rolling out, we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out and what Twitter users’ responses are.