April 3, 2017
Express yourselves! Say more with Twitter’s latest tweak
We can all agree that saying everything we need to within the character limit on Twitter can become quite tedious and at times extremely frustrating! Yet somehow, being the super-species we are, we have adapted and now excelled at this. In 2006, the limit was 160 characters and a decade later, at a limit of 140 characters, Twitter decided to help with this problem and allowed for quoting Retweets, attaching media such as images, GIF without it affecting the character limit.
Once again, Twitter have introduced another modification: Twitter handles preceded by a person’s account name will now be displayed above the Tweet in small text. The platform now has 319 million active users & from Twitter’s point of view, they found users engage more in conversations. We will now be tapping on ‘Replying to…’ to be able to see who is part of our conversations. This new design will help when reading conversations where we will now see the flow as opposed to seeing a ton of @usernames at the start of a Tweet.
It is interesting to note that there has been a little bit of concern raised regarding this new layout. Users argue that it will be harder to combat harassment leaving the question as to why Twitter have stuck with this design in the first place. Twitter claim their update is a direct response to user feedback, research & experimentation. They also promise to continually improve their layout making the platform easier to use.
Another recent update that Twitter have made was to get rid of the infamous default profile picture- the egg! This was made to encourage users to upload pictures of themselves. Twitter believe this will help with the problem of the association of the default egg photo & the negative behaviour of Twitter trolls. It was for this reason, they allowed for user to mute ‘egg’ accounts altogether. Although this doesn’t solve the problem of trolling altogether, the company believes that users will not prefer to use the default profile picture as it has a generic nature.