15 New Features on Twitter We Can Benefit from

 2013 Twitter Changes Recap

2013 was a busy year for Twitter resulted in multiple interface and functionality changes.

Recently Twitter announced a lot of changes, which touched both user-related functionality and advertising facilities of the platform. Someone may call it evolution, and others will consider as a growing competition among social networks. Anyway, Twitter becomes better and we can apparently benefit from these changes.

Pictures in feeds
One of the most remarkable enhancements was adding a possibility to view tweet pictures and photos within users’ feeds. Users no longer need to click on source tweets to see pictures, and therewith we got more colorful and attractive Twitter streams.

Twitter alerts

New Twitter alerts made it possible to get emergency notifications, amplified with orange bell icons, pushed by public organizations and institutions.

Photos sharing
Since December 2013 Twitter’s users are able to share their photos via direct messages on iOS and Android platforms.

Redesigned Twitter profiles are available for some celebrities

Galleries instead of keyboards
Now iOS Twitter app firstly offers to choose a photo from the gallery before starting to type a message. This is a clear motivation to publish more photos and defines how Twitter sees the primary way for interacting with the platform.

Twitter recommendation notifications
Last year Twitter rolled out personalized notifications about new prominent network entrants, mass retweets, and favoring.

The 2014 will hardly be easier for Twitter than 2013, as it has lots of plans for this year.

The Newest Enhancements on Twitter

Twitter redesign
Twitter redesign is the most discussed and controversial piece of news of last several months. Many people find it attractive and more informative while others - too Facebook alike.

The new design provides a larger user’s photo and big cover banner on top of the page. User’s info is placed below profile's photo and is followed by followers’ photos and user’s gallery.

Redesigned profiles are already available for some celebrities (Zac Efron, Channing Tatum, Floyd Mayweather and John Legend), while other users are announced to get changes in several weeks.

Photos managing
Twitter pays much attention to photos managing within twitter and its apps. Android users e.g. are able to crop and rotate photos to make them suitable for a certain tweet.

Online TV shows on Twitter
Last months Twitter signed several partnership agreements with broadcasting and cable TV companies in order to give users an opportunity to watch movies and TV shows online and discuss them on Twitter.

Some Twitter users can pin their best tweets

Pinned tweets
Some of so called high-profile Twitter users recently got an opportunity to pin their best tweets on the top of their stream for free. But this feature is also available for advertisers.

Twitter pop-up notification for web
Twitter starts to notify users about new engagements with their accounts within the platform. Notification pop-up appears in the lower right-hand corner and provides an opportunity to send direct messages or follow someone back.

Twitter galleries
Twitter continues to encourage users to place more photos and recently rolled out a corresponding functionality. Now users can add four photos to tweets and up to ten tags of their friends without taking away any number of characters from their 140-symbol message limit. This functionality is available on iPhone app yet, but Android and Twitter itself are coming soon.

ID targeted promotions
The same as Facebook, Twitter now offers ID and e-mail targeted ads.

“Fave People” timeline
The “Fave People” timeline is extremely useful for those users, who follow multiple Twitter accounts, but don’t want to miss a tweet from especially favorite ones. This timeline displays tweets from only several selected accounts. This feature is now being tested among narrow group of Android users.

Twitter web version supports Emojis

Emojis on Twitter
Twitter now supports Emojis on its web version.

New way to discover fresh content
Android users are available to get new content after the reload of the timeline page, when there are no new tweets in the stream. Instead they see trending topic promotions and account recommendations, or tweet suggestions.

So, big players of global social networking become much similar, but still have their own distinctive features. Perhaps, functionality and even design unification is a natural process, when it it comes to global domination, but let us hope that Twitter will finally save its uniqueness.

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