Twitter is one of those social networks that have stuck to their true nature where the core experience has not changed in a while. When you login, you can see other people’s tweets on the timeline and you can decide to join the conversation by checking the top trends that are shown in their own special category.
However, it seemed that this was not enough for Twitter, and last year, they proposed additional features that would spur more ‘meaningful’ interactions on the website.
Sara Haider, Twitter’s Director of Product Management, tweeted this last year where she announced that they were playing with some features to make Twitter more conversational.
hey Twitter. we've been playing with some rough features to make it feel more conversational here. presence and reply threading. still early and iterating on these ideas. thoughts? pic.twitter.com/3U3NvpHWPy
— sara beykpour (@pandemona) August 31, 2018
There is a follow up to this and now Twitter is launching a new beta program where they will let a small section of users use some of the features shown above.
This new experiment will allow Twitter to share these new features with a lucky few and some of the experimental features include status updates and collapsing replies to highlight the ones you’re interested in.
According to Haider, the idea behind Status updates is for spurring conversations on a wide range of topics. A good example is using the Status Update as shown above, which will give context to what you might be tweeting about in the future. That Status Update appears under your basic profile info and can be a good system to inform people who are following a certain event.
Also from the screenshot, Status updates also includes such premade updates like ‘available’, ‘hello’, ‘I’m in a certain *add location*’, ‘I’m in a certain trending event, ‘I voted’ among others.
The other feature is all about making Twitter conversations easy to sort out. Twitter has done some work on this before where they surface tweets with the highest engagement towards the top on a tweet with a lot of replies. In the new beta system, they want to improve the visuals which includes indentations and collapsing replies to only highlight what you are interested in.
These features look interesting and we have to wait and see whether they will be rolled out to everyone sometime this year.
