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Posts tagged with "twitter"

Twitter’s Moment

Astute take by Ben Thompson on Twitter Moments:

What is exciting is that Moments isn’t close to fulfilling its potential: imagine a tweet-based newspaper drawn not only from the best sources in a mobile-friendly format, but one perfectly customized to you. This is what Twitter is already like for power users, but again, getting to that state is simply too difficult. Figuring out how to do this systematically on users’ behalf should be Twitter’s chief aim.

“Should” is probably a bit superfluous: the incentives for Twitter to focus on this type of customization are massive. Twitter is uniquely positioned to understand what its users are interested in, something that at least theoretically rivals Facebook’s imposing demographic information, SnapChat’s youth advantage, or Pinterest’s grasp of my aspirations. The reason customized Moments matter is because there are two payoffs: the user experience is better, and the advertising that will undoubtedly be sold in Moments will be better targeted and more effective.

After Tweetbot 4, Moments are one of the few features (next to search and images/big emoji in DMs) which justify keeping the Twitter app installed. Hopefully, the international rollout won’t be too slow.

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Twitter Launches Moments

Twitter has officially launched Moments: previously known as Project Lightning, Moments is a new section of the Twitter app that aggregates collections of tweets in a custom layout which contains pictures, GIFs, Vines, and more. You can browse Moments, subscribe to one temporarily and have tweets belonging to that Moment show up in your timeline, and act upon individual tweets in a Moment, which are laid out with swipeable full-screen cards.

Casey Newton writes at The Verge:

A big week for Twitter just got bigger. A day after announcing co-founder Jack Dorsey would return to the company as its CEO, the company is rolling out the product formerly known as Project Lightning to a worldwide audience. Moments, as the new product is called, surfaces the day’s most talked-about stories in a new section of the app. It’s a magazine-like view of Twitter that works even if you’ve never followed a single person. It represents Twitter’s best — and maybe last — hope of attracting a large new base of casual users who want to enjoy the service without having to figure out its unique quirks and lingo.

From Twitter’s blog post:

Every day, people share hundreds of millions of Tweets. Among them are things you can’t experience anywhere but on Twitter: conversations between world leaders and celebrities, citizens reporting events as they happen, cultural memes, live commentary on the night’s big game, and many more. We know finding these only-on-Twitter moments can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t followed certain accounts. But it doesn’t have to be.

Moments helps you find the best of Twitter as easily as tapping an icon – regardless of who you follow. Just visit the new tab called Moments, where you will discover stories unfolding on Twitter.

Interestingly, Twitter has assembled a dedicated team of curators to sift through the best tweets for each Moment, but they’re also partnering up with various media companies to provide their own Moments. Somewhat reminiscent of Snapchat Discover, Twitter Moments won’t likely appeal to the power users who constantly check their timelines with Tweetbot, but it could help in bringing new people to Twitter by simplifying the process of following news.

If done well, I’d argue that even power users could derive some value from temporarily following tweets curated by Twitter for events like football games, tech events, conferences, and more. The highly visual format also reminds me of Facebook Paper, and the richness of modern Twitter features such as Vines and GIFs really shines in Moments thanks to full-screen playback and gesture-based interactions.

Sadly, Twitter Moments appears to be a staggered rollout: the Moments tab is launching in the US first; users outside of the US will be able to view Moments shared via links, but they won’t have the dedicated tab to browse all of them, which is coming “soon”.

To start, we’re introducing Moments to people in the US across Android, iPhone, and the desktop web. But as with Tweets, a Moment can be shared anywhere: if you discover a link to a Moment in a Tweet or DM, or embedded elsewhere, those of you outside the US can enjoy the same experience we’re rolling out today. And we’re hard at work to bring this same functionality to more places in the coming weeks and months.

I don’t understand Twitter’s decision to prevent users from browsing Moments in English (is it because of US-based ads and partners?), but I think the feature is a good first step to better explain the value of Twitter and expose its information-rich nature to more users. I’m curious to actually try it on a daily basis.

See also: BuzzFeed’s guide to Twitter Moments and the company’s guidelines.

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Twitter Updates iPad App for iOS 9

Good on Twitter for living up to their end of the bargain: the redesigned, uninspired iPad app has already been updated with Slide Over and Split View, which lets you keep your Twitter timeline next to other apps. (Be careful, as that may lead to decreased productivity.)

Kind of odd that Twitter isn’t supporting Universal Links for twitter.com links on iOS 9, though. It’d make perfect sense to be able to tap a link to a tweet and view it in the native app.

Also absent, but not surprising: Safari View Controller. But we already know why.

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Twitter Aims to Unify iOS Apps, Updates its iPad App

Brendan Donohue, writing on the Twitter Blog:

Previously, Twitter for iPhone and iPad offered very different experiences. Now, Twitter apps on these devices will be more consistent regardless of which one you’re using. Starting today, iPad users will be able to create and see revamped quote Tweets, explore trending topics in search, visit product and place pages, and more. We’d like to tell you how we made this happen.

Although they shared some code, Twitter for iPad and Twitter for iPhone were originally developed and designed separately. Each app was tailored to its platform — but required a lot of extra effort to develop. All too often, this meant that Twitter for iPad features lagged behind other updates. To fix this, we had to rethink our approach.

The good news is that Twitter’s iPad app is now mostly at feature parity with the Twitter iPhone app. The bad news is that Twitter’s iPad app doesn’t exactly use the extra screen space of the iPad efficiently, and instead is mostly just a scaled-up version of their iPhone app.

This is probably explained by the fact that Twitter has been working hard on rebuilding a solid foundation across all their platforms to ensure feature-parity, as they explain in their blog post. It may just be that they wanted wanted to get something out the door and (finally) update the iPad app and they didn’t get a chance to fully adapt the design for the iPad. That might be naive of me, but I’m sure there are some at Twitter who recognise that this update still leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to a good iPad Twitter app and will work hard to continually improve it.

What we’ve got so far is a baseline to make everything work well. It’s been a huge effort to rewrite the system in place as seamlessly as possible. One of our first steps was building landscape support, which we shipped for the iPhone 6 Plus earlier this summer. From this effort, we learned a lot about how and when to adapt to changing conditions. This was the foundation on which we built our updated iPad support. Now, we have new tools that are more robust and allow faster iteration. Adaptive UI gives us the ability to support new devices and bring new Twitter features to people faster. But as you might expect, from time to time there are going to be some differences in features and functionality between devices. In the future, we aim to get Twitter for iPad and iPhone to complete feature parity.


Apple Launches App Store Games Twitter Account

Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:

Apple has launched a dedicated Twitter feed for gaming just days before the company is expected to reveal a new Apple TV that doubles as a gaming console. Apple confirmed the authenticity of the account to The Verge, which sent out its first tweet this morning. It included a GIF featuring some of the platform’s most popular games, including Clash of Clans and Angry Birds.

Staffed by App Store Games Editors, the new @AppStoreGames Twitter account will feature various kinds of content, as Apple told The Verge:

The Twitter feed will feature more than just the usual picks for app of the week, the company said. App Store editors will run the feed, and plan to populate it with sneak previews of games, tips and tricks, and profiles of talented gamers. Editors will also interact with game developers on the feed, Apple said.

This is far from Apple’s first foray into actively using social media, but in recent times they’ve become more sophisticated in the way they approach it, and the frequency to which they use it. Just a few short weeks ago Apple launched a Snapchat account for Apple Music, which has been incredibly well produced. Just looking at the first day of tweets from @AppStoreGames (a sample of which are embedded below) and it looks like this account is well worth a follow.

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Twitter Removes 140-Character Limit From DMs

Twitter also removed the 140-character limit from direct messages today (as promised). Surprisingly, this will be rolled out to the seemingly forgotten Twitter for Mac as well:

We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac. It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks. If you can’t wait to try out longer Direct Messages, be sure you’re using the latest versions of our apps so you get the update right away. Sending and receiving Direct Messages via SMS will still be limited.

I tried to send a long DM from Twitter for iPhone and iPad, but I’m still stuck on the 140-character version there. However, sending a 600-character DM from Tweetbot for iPhone worked fine.

As I wrote in June:

The strength of Twitter DMs is, for me, the existing graph between users (people I’m interested in), speed, and the lack of baggage from email. Lately, I’ve come to like the ability to easily share links and pictures in DMs as well. I don’t know if raising the character limit to 10k characters will by itself improve DMs, but Twitter is wasting an opportunity with DMs, so maybe their new CEO could use this as a starting point.

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Twitter Rolls Out Full-Archive Search API

Twitter has added support for full-archive search to their API, allowing – in theory – third-party clients to retrieve every tweet ever posted on the service. From their blog:

The Full-Archive Search API combines the best aspects of two of Gnip’s most popular offerings to solve enterprise business needs with user experiences not previously possible. By pairing instant accessibility with the full archive of historical Tweets, we’ve created a new premium solution for our ecosystem of partners to deliver historical social data to their own clients.

Since Twitter added full-archive search to their app last year, I’ve been using the feature every day to find old stuff I or others tweeted in the past. There’s no word on pricing for Gnip customers, but hopefully apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific will be able to take advantage of it. Developer documentation is available here.

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Keeping Tabs on Twitter’s Experimental Tabs

Alex Kantrowitz, writing for BuzzFeed:

Starting today, some U.S. Twitter users will see a News tab appear in their Twitter apps.

The experimental feature, part of Twitter’s effort to make its best content easy to find, inhabits the middle tab of the app’s navigation bar and brings up a list of headlines that are trending on the platform. When you click a headline, you’re taken to a story screen with an image, headline, block of text from the story, and the top tweets discussing it.

I feel like I can no longer make the joke that Twitter keeps experimenting without supporting basic iOS features. This looks like a good summary of trending news on Twitter, but it’s also no Nuzzel, and I wonder how quickly it’ll be supplanted by Project Lightning (“Moments?”) when it launches.

Maybe I should start coming up with punchlines about their iPad app in the meantime.

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