One other aspect of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter 2.0’ reformation plan is giving customers extra capability to share longer posts, both in video or textual content type, inside the app.
Musk has repeatedly famous his need to build YouTube-like features into the app, enabling customers to submit longer video, with a view to preserve viewers from clicking throughout to a different app to devour video content material (and supply one other monetization alternative for creators). Longer textual content is one other space of focus, with Musk additionally telling customers that longer tweets – doubtlessly as much as 4,000 characters – are coming quickly.
So how would that work?
Quick-form textual content has been a foundational aspect of Twitter, so you may’t simply out of the blue change to partitions of textual content dominating the tweet feed, proper?
Lately, Twitter designer Andrea Conway shared some mock-ups of how longer tweets could look in-stream, and the way the method may work, if/when applied.
As you may see on this instance, longer tweets would probably seem in-stream on the common tweet size, with a ‘Show more’ indicator on the finish of the primary 280 characters. Customers may then broaden the tweet to learn extra, with doubtlessly the complete 4,000 characters then displayed in an extended tweet panel.
That might allow Twitter to supply extra room to share longer ideas, with out interrupting the tweet stream an excessive amount of. However then once more, it does additionally look like the one option to scale back that large tweet panel once more could be to scroll all the way down to the underside of the expanded tweet – and if the character restrict is certainly elevated to 4k, that could possibly be loads of annoying scrolling simply to seek out out what’s hidden behind that ‘Show more’ marker.
Twitter may remedy for this by offering extra information on precisely how for much longer the complete tweet goes. It’s experimenting with an analogous notification for tweet creators, noting that solely the primary 280 characters might be displayed for his or her longer tweets.
It may equally replace the notification on the ‘Show more’ immediate, with one thing like ‘Read remaining 3,000 characters’ because the indicator as an alternative, which may save customers from tapping, and unspooling a large article inside a tweet.
That would, nonetheless, scale back the quantity of engagement with longer tweets – however then once more, not indicating the complete size may, in impact, have the identical influence, as customers would possibly get sick of increasing out large tweets and simply cease tapping the immediate both manner.
It’s additionally not clear that that is one thing that customers need on Twitter, given its historic deal with short-form messaging, and it’ll be fascinating to see the way it’s acquired if/when it does finally get rolled out.
Twitter’s been attempting to work out a greater option to share longer type content material for a while. Previous to the Musk takeover, Twitter had been experimenting with ‘Notes’, which enabled customers to create posts of as much as 2,500 phrases that would then be natively embedded into the Twitter app for simple sharing.
It appears that evidently this mission has now been shelved, in favor, doubtlessly, of longer tweets, with the concept being that this can alleviate the necessity to ship screenshots of textual content, whereas additionally serving to Twitter enhance engagement and dwell time, and host a greater variety of content material codecs.
There’s no phrase as but on a stay check of longer tweets, nor whether or not it will likely be made accessible to all customers or simply Twitter Blue subscribers (longer video looks set to be a Twitter Blue exclusive element).
We’ll preserve you up to date on any progress.
