Some of those who use Twitter on the iPhone may have noticed a new feature: it’s being tested, here’s what it is
Twitter is a platform that has revolutionized the social landscape thanks to its immediacy: the few characters that the social allows to share make the concepts expressed short and incisive, and probably the old 160-character limit was crucial to its success.
For some time now, driven by growing pressure from users, Twitter has increased the 160-character limit to 280. Some, welcoming the news negatively, said that it could have been too “radical” a change, one that could have marked the beginning of the end for the social network. Time has told us that this was not the case, indeed Twitter has continued to grow and to encourage interaction between users. Now the platform is preparing for something new, namely the introduction of “edge-to-edge” videos: waiting for the test phase ends and the platform decides whether or not to implement them permanently, here’s what it’s about.
What are edge-to-edge videos in test
The novelty is actually simple to imagine. The edge-to-edge video test, which involves some of the users using Twitter via iPhone, involves photos, GIFs and videos taking up more space while viewing, and thus going from one “border” of the display to the other. The moment the novelty yields positive responses and is available to all, it will result in a full-screen content experience, similar to what other social sites like Instagram already provide for photos and videos.
Twitter explained that it is testing edge-to-edge videos to better support both video- and text-based interactions. Among the reasons not said, however, it is assumed that in this way the social wants to put a patch on an algorithm of “crop”, ie cropping, images that has proven repeatedly over the years to be far from perfect, forcing the developers of Twitter to eliminate the crop of images altogether.
Some users who have had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new feature in testing have expressed dissatisfaction, accusing the new edge-to-edge system of “causing headaches”, and complaining that by doing so content from extreme to extreme can be confused with tweets. But that’s exactly what the testing phases are for, to collect the feelings of so many users during daily use and understand if the novelty can be improved before being distributed to everyone.
Twitter will therefore have some material to study on to see if edge-to-edge videos are fine like this or if instead their implementation can be optimized in some way.
In test also the temporary block
In the meantime, among Twitter’s tests (such as Facebook-style groups) there are also some for privacy. One concerns the temporary blocking of some users, that is the possibility to silence a user for a certain period of time without removing him/her from your list.
The temporary blocking test is currently involving the web version of Twitter, but it seems that it should soon interest users of smartphone and tablet apps as well. According to Twitter, the novelty represents a “more subtle tool to put some distance between you and someone else.”