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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Twitter Launches Mute Feature, Updates iPad App

Following screenshots first surfaced two weeks ago, Twitter officially started rolling out a mute feature today that will allow users to stop seeing tweets and retweets from other users in their timelines without unfollowing them. The feature, rolling out to Twitter for iPhone, Android, and web, will also be available to third-party Twitter developers through the service’s API.

From the Twitter blog:

In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less. Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.

The mute feature can be accessed through a contextual menu available both on the web and iOS; muted users will be indicated by a red mute icon on their profile page, and they can be “unmuted” at any time.

Made popular by third-party clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific, muting has long been requested by users who wished to keep following somebody without necessarily seeing all their tweets in the timeline on a daily basis. Twitter’s implementation, however, doesn’t include the more advanced features found in Tapbots’ client for iPhone and iPad: in Twitter, muting is limited to users, while Tweetbot includes muting filters for hashtags and specific keywords. It’s unclear at this point whether third-party apps will switch to Twitter’s official mute feature soon, but it’s likely that developers will choose to keep their own custom solutions as options for advanced mute filters.

In today’s rollout, Twitter also updated their iOS app to version 6.5 to include changes to the iPad interface that mirror what the company brought to the iPhone months ago. Media from Vine as well as Twitter Photos are displayed in the timeline with inline previews, alongside buttons to quickly retweet, reply, mark as favorite, or follow other users. Navigation has been refreshed, search comes with tabs for Top and All tweets, and it’s now possible to apply filters to photos directly on the iPad.

Twitter 6.5 is rolling out on the App Store.

Twitter Experimenting With Mute Feature In iOS App→

Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:

One of the most-requested features for Twitter’s mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Some users of the company’s iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user’s tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won’t be seeing another person’s tweets, but they won’t know that.

Alongside timeline sync and streaming, mute is one of the most popular features of third-party iOS clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific. Based on screenshots from people who can see the feature in their Twitter app, it looks like Twitter is experimenting with a simple account-based option; in Tweetbot, you can create complex mute filters for keywords and usernames.

While I don’t see myself moving away from Tweetbot 3 any time soon, I’d certainly welcome a mute button in Twitter for iOS (which I like to use when looking for news).

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Tweet Library 2.5→

Manton Reece’s Tweet Library remains my favorite app to find old tweets from my account directly on iOS (it works with any Twitter Archive). Tweet Library isn’t a full-featured Twitter client: it does come with basic tweeting and timeline functionalities, but it’s made for retrieval of tweets and organization in collections.

This week, Manton released a 2.5 update that fixes bugs and adds a URL scheme to launch Tweet Library searches from other apps. The URL scheme makes it easy to trigger searches from Drafts and Launch Center Pro, and I’m also happy about the CSV export option for collections.

Here’s Manton on the update:

When I gave up on Twitter as a user, many people asked if I would abandon Tweet Library. I wasn’t sure at first, but the answer now is a clear “no”. In fact, since my last personal tweet in 2012, I’ve released new features and even redesigned the app for iOS 7.

But I do need to start consolidating my work on Tweet Library and Watermark, because the apps share so many concepts around archiving and search. To that end, this week I’m retiring tweetlibrary.com as a way to browse and publish collections. The site will now redirect to a special landing page on Watermark. Published collections from Tweet Library also go to a public page on Watermark.

Tweet Library is $4.99 on the App Store.

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Twitter Rolling Out Photo Tagging, Up To Four Photos In A Tweet

In an update to their iOS app released today, Twitter has started rolling out two enhancements to make photos “more social”: one is the ability to tag people in a tweet; the other is an option to include up to four photos in a single tweet.

With photo tagging, Twitter aims at increasing conversations between users by allowing people to be tagged with @usernames that don’t count against the limit of 140 characters in a tweet. As noted by Matthew Panzarino, tagged @usernames count as metadata in the new photo tagging feature; up to 10 people can be tagged in a photo, and they will be alerted of the new tag through a notification. Photo tagging has long been a marquee feature of networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and it’ll be interesting to see if Twitter will eventually roll out new gallery views on profiles to browse or filter photos by tag.

The second change in today’s update is an option to attach up to four photos in a tweet. From Twitter’s blog post:

And now, you can also share a series of photos that automatically create a collage. Just tap on a preview to get the full image and slide through the group. The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and twitter.com. Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view Tweets with multiple photos.

Both tags and multiple photos will be enabled in embedded tweets, and, while the statement has been made by Twitter’s developer team before, “there’s no reason” today’s new features couldn’t be available for third-party clients as well.

Twitter 6.3 for iOS is available on the App Store.

Twitter #music Shutting Down→

Mike Beasley:

According to a pair of tweets posted on the official @TwitterMusic account, the app will be removed from the App Store later today and all streaming service will end on April 18th—one year after the app first launched.

Twitter #music launched on April 18, 2013. The #music app wasn’t necessarily bad – it had some interesting touches and design details – but its implementation of streaming was confusing, as I noted in my original article:

As a daily music listener, the 1-song limitation is confusing and anachronistic. It feels like Last.fm all over again: in spite of its direct plug into Rdio and Spotify, Twitter will only play one song from an artist – their “top” one, according to Twitter – then move on to the next one. Why is that so? Do they expect users to always want to listen to just one song and jump from artist to artist all the time? I understand this for #NowPlaying, which is a Twitter-like feed for single songs in your timeline, but I can’t seeem to find a good motivation for this choice in other areas of the app. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to three songs from an artist I just discovered while, to use Twitter’s parlance, I keep engaging with him on Twitter?

Twitter never put much effort into #music after that; in the meantime, new on-demand streaming services have arisen and Apple has built iTunes Radio directly into the iOS Music app. It appears, then, that Twitter #music will follow the demise of Ping, Apple’s social music recommendation service that never took off.

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The First App You Open In The Morning→

MG Siegler:

You wake up. You grab your phone. What’s the first app you open?

This sounds like a silly question — or worse, an insulting one. But I find it’s a rather enlightening question. Depending on when the question is asked, the answer can either be telling about the current state of apps or the current state of you.

Like MG, the first app I open every morning is Twitter – well, Tweetbot anyway. It used to be email; then Tweetie; at one point, it was Reeder; for the past year, the first app I’ve always opened in the morning has been Tweetbot. Twitter used to be described as the “water cooler”, and maybe to an extent it still is – but the scope is much larger these days. I can open Twitter and instantly see my mentions about MacStories or The Prompt, direct messages from friends, breaking news, interesting articles, the latest meme – anything. In fact, when in the morning I tell my girlfriend I’m “catching up on the news”, it means I’m scrolling through Tweetbot/Twitter.

In the past few months, I’ve been enjoying the Discover section of the official Twitter app as a “catch up system” too. However, my favorite aspect of the morning Twitter routine remains Tweetbot’s support for background fetching of tweets on iOS 7 – it’s why Tweetbot for iPhone is the first app I use.

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Twitter 3.0 Lands on the Mac App Store

Twitter 3.0 for the Mac sort of brings the Mac app up to date with its iOS counterpart, adding inline images, inline tweet convos and stats in the details view, profile photos, and a refreshed look and feel all around. The app lacks sending and viewing photos in direct messages (which was just announced), but I’m guessing that will come in a future update. I was hoping the Mac app would get a complete redesign since the current design is past its prime, but all things considered it’s the iOS for iPad equivalent of Twitter’s experience on the desktop. … Also, is it just me, or does scrolling the timeline feel off?

Download Twitter 3.0 on the Mac App Store.

[Twitter via @sandofsky]

iOS 7 Updates: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Weather, and Google Chrome

Yesterday saw the release of thousands of apps optimized, enhanced, or, in some cases, completely redesigned for iOS 7. At MacStories, we highlighted several apps that were ready for the OS’ rollout such as Pocket, OmniFocus 2, or Instacast 4, and then we fired up iTunes – or simply waited for automatic updates to do their magic on iOS 7 – and checked out all the other apps that were also released yesterday. In this post, I thought I could offer a quick overview of iOS 7 updates from four big-name companies: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. Read more