Two Important Twitter Updates
Posted by aonenetworks On August 30, 2013
Twitter has been busy lately updating their website for many different things, and today brings just a few more updates to the way feeds work and the ease of reporting abusive tweets.
The first new feature is the “report abuse” button, which has been something that users have been asking about for months, if not years. The move comes after a number of journalists were harassed and threatened through tweets with no way to report abuse. All applications, as well as the desktop version, were updated a few days following the abuse of some female journalists. Before Twitter made the button an easy click on all tweets, a user had to search the site and the help manual to figure out how to report such an abuse. Twitter also said they will be adding more staff to verify and delete flagged or abusive tweets.
The second noteworthy feature that Twitter has changed is the way tweets group in the feed. After seven years of separating each and every individual tweet, the company has decided that now the tweets will be grouped together by conversation instead. This change means that tweets will still show up in chronological order, but will be connected by a vertical line so a conversation can be followed smoothly. The way the feed is currently set up often makes it difficult to associate a lone comment with its original post.
“We’ve now made it easier for you to see conversations as they’re taking place,” wrote Jinen Kamdar, Twitter employee, in Twitter’s blog. “Tweets that are part of a conversation are shown in chronological order, so it’s easier for you to follow along.”
Although the format is changing somewhat, Twitter isn’t straying too far from their real-time feed. For example, let’s say you tweet about a new business product. A follower tweets a reply. Not only is the reply now attached to the post, it’s also bumped to the top of your timeline, with a connection to the original post via vertical line. However, these conversations are unique to each and every user, so you won’t see replies from people you don’t know.
Twitter has several more big changes planned for its microblogging website, but a report button and more cohesive conversations are two steps in the right direction.
