twitter udpate Archives

While Twitter is known to be a platform for people to share their unfiltered views, it surely has landed many known and unknown people in trouble for the same reason. While the primarily text-based social media platform allows people to share their views it has a few limitations that the competing platforms possess. While Instagram has close friends and edit post options, Twitter had no such option. Well, that was only till now, as Twitter has recently launched the Twitter Circles feature which allows users to share their tweets with a specified group of people.

The idea behind Twitter Circle is that one might not want to share their tweets with all of their friends, family, and colleagues. While one friend group of yours might enjoy a controversial take on a mainstream movie, others might not. Hence, Twitter Circles allows your views to be restricted to one set of people. The social media platform started testing the feature back in May, however, the Twitter Circle is now available to everyone.

The Circle is quite similar to Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ feature which allows you to share posts with a small group of people. On Twitter, users can add up to 150 people to your ‘Circle’. People you add to your Circle do not need to follow you, hence, if you want to tweet something specifically tailored for Harry Styles or Lizzo fans, you’ll be able to do it!

How to add Twitter Circle

Users will be able to share a Twitter Circle tweet when they open the Tweet composer.

Select the ‘Choose Audience’ option within the Tweet composer.
Select ‘Edit’ next to the Twitter Circle option
Search and select the people you want in the circle (People can also be selected from the recommended list)
Click ‘X’ and continue typing the tweet

Once the Twitter Circle is added, users have the option to choose between the audience of ‘Everyone’ or ‘Twitter Circle’. Users need to know that the Circle tweets cannot be retweeted as they are restricted to a limited audience. As of now, Twitter is also testing the ‘Edit’ post option.

Twitter’s Chief Product Officer Kayvon Keykpour, last year confirmed that Twitter is ‘exploring’ the idea of adding a dislike button to the app. The social media app is now working on adding a new upvote and downvote reactions to tweets.

The company confirmed that it is testing the feature for a small group of iOS users through a tweet. Twitter said that the new feature might be available to the users in several different styles(up and down arrows, a heart icon, and thumbs up and thumbs down icons). The app is testing the feature to ‘understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.’

However, downvotes will not be shown publicly, and the upvotes will be displayed as likes since the feature is intended only for internal metrics.

Twitter has clarified that the feature is just for research purposes and hasn’t finalised rolling it out yet. The company hasn’t yet defined how voting will affect what you see in your feed since the feature can draw parallels to Reddit. Upvoting or downvoting on Reddit is a way of surfacing a Redditor’s favourite replies, responses or posts.

Many users have noticed this similarity, including Reddit itself, who tweeted this in response:

Twitter has also recently announced that it is testing a new set of features for TweetDeck. The company is revamping its often-ignored dashboard with updates such as a full tweet composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new way to group columns into new workspaces.

This feature is being tested with a few US, Canada, and Australia users. The social media giant is consistently working upon bringing new and desirable changes to its app so more and more users can connect conveniently.

Of course, the application of these features will depend upon the reviews that Twitter gets during the research process.