Twitter is testing threaded replies and status indicators
Twitter wants to be more conversational — and apparently more like a message board and a chat app. In a post retweeted by Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, the company’s head of product Sara Haider showed screenshots of two features the platform is testing. One of them is reply threading, which shows responses as nested, color-coded tweets. They seem more similar to Reddit’s threads and Facebook’s, since even a response to a response is indented.
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 Haider (@pandemona) August 31, 2018
The other feature is online status indicator, which shows everyone that you’re on the platform and ready to respond with a telling green dot like Facebook Messenger’s and Instagram’s. If these test features were movies, then nested responses received a mixed reception, while this one got mostly negative reviews. As one commenter told Haider, people with bad intentions could exploit it. They could wait for their targets to go online, for instance, and then brigade them when they’re vulnerable. Thankfully, Haider assured that she wants users to have full control over the feature, which hopefully means it’s opt-in and you can switch it off if you change your mind.
definitely. would want you to have full control over showing it.
— Sara Haider (@pandemona) September 1, 2018
Since these are test features, very few people can access them for now. They’ll also continue to evolve before they make their way to everyone’s accounts if ever the platform decides to give them a wider release.
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