Twitter Announces New Features September 2019

At a press conference at Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco, platform representatives announced several new initiatives which are currently underway, and are designed to help users stay up-to-date on various specific topics. These are seen as more of the updates and tweaks undertaken by Twitter which are intended to increase usage, and to help users discover tweet content which is more relative to their circumstances. Here are five of the major initiatives announced by the Twitter team, which are in various stages of development, but will soon be rolled out to users everywhere.

Topic lists

This new feature will be especially useful for keeping you up-to-date on a specific topic, and is currently in the testing stage at Twitter. This will give you the capability of having a swipeable format which can showcase curated tweets based on one of your interests, for instance baseball, Lord of the Rings, or Dwayne Johnson. The curation team will in essence, assemble Twitter lists of the most important accounts to follow on any given subject, and will then provide curation for those streams, to ensure that they stay relevant to the subject in question.

Twitter has been testing a swipeable lists feature for some time now, and this version of it is specifically curated to selected subjects. At this stage of testing, the swipeable lists are being handled by a small group of testers, and they involve some very detailed curation. It is expected that at some point, this whole experience will have to be scaled, and at that time an algorithm would be needed to automate the process. There will of course, be a challenge involved with that scaling, because when the program is broadened, it will be necessary to avoid spam and other controversial content.

Conversation subscriptions

Twitter is also developing a brand-new option which will allow users to sign up, so they can be notified when any responses are submitted to tweets they are specifically interested in. While this feature is presently very early in its testing phase, it is anticipated that a general rollout will take place in the near future. This is a feature that many users have asked for from Twitter, and the relatively quick reaction by the platform is seen as a move to placate and satisfy the existing base of Twitter users.

Reordering of image attachments

Another of the features announced at the San Francisco press conference was the reordering of attached images. This will enable users to drag and reorder graphics or images which have been attached to a tweet, which will be a big help when composing a new tweet. This capability was originally detected in test mode in July, which means it's fairly well along in its testing phase, and is likely to be rolled out sooner rather than later. This of course, is not an earth-shattering development, but even though it's a very simple capability, it is likely to be well received by the masses of Twitter users, who have long expressed an interest in seeing such a capability.

Live Photo support

Support for Live Photos is something that Twitter has been wanting to include in its arsenal for some time now, specifically those Live Photos which have been captured through an iPhone. Live Photos have the capability of recording any activity which occurs 1.5 seconds before you take a picture, as well as 1.5 seconds after you take the image. This will provide you with an active clip, rather than a simple still image, which is what you would normally have when taking photos.When using Live Photos in tweets, you'll have another dimension added to your attached images. It should be noted that this could also develop into a source of contention on those occasions where you're not aware you captured or uploaded a live photo. That means it will be to your advantage to be aware of, and check on your image capture settings before you begin taking pictures. As long as you're aware of what you're getting, there should be no issues with taking Live Photos, and you'll probably find the image clip to be very useful in a number of different ways.

Direct Message search

The last of the announced features from the San Francisco press conference was a Direct Message search feature, which was only recently identified by power users as being in test mode on the platform. This would allow you to scroll through all direct messages on your account to find those matching specific keywords, so that you can locate all messages of interest on any given topic.

Other initiatives

Without announcing any specific features relevant to the topic, Twitter representatives announced that they are also committed to working on improving user safety, especially with regard to content removal decisions. The platform would like to provide more insight to users which will help them make better decisions about content removal, when the need arises. Representatives also discussed the potential of providing ephemeral tweets to users, which are tweets that would disappear after a pre-specified time frame elapses.There was also some discussion of an edit button which many users have been clamoring for, but which Twitter has yet to incorporate into their plans for the future. This was asked about specifically, and the best answer which could be provided was that the edit button was on the list of things to do, but is presently not near the top of the priority list. So for all those people who have been urging the platform to develop this edit button, you can take solace in the fact that at some point, it probably will be added on as a feature.However, that time is not going to be anytime in the foreseeable future, because it is known that no current testing is underway, and none is planned. This may be a small disappointment to users, but the new features which have been provided by Twitter are certain to find a welcome reception among users, and all of these new capabilities are likely to become very popular.