Twelve years since it was launched, Twitter in some ways has been more than a social media platform but that’s for users who know how it works. For newbies who just logged in, Twitter doesn’t really tell you what it offers and for them to know what Twitter is, they’ll need to just use it to see for themselves. While there are some who put in the time to go through the chronological feed to see what they want to know, there are casual users who log in to the App once a while just to check out what’s going on with the few accounts that they follow. For those of us, Twitter is now working on delivering the latest breaking news and live events with designs changes in key elements of the app to help bring the best possible informative content in real-time.
In a blog post, Twitter today revealed that it’s developing newer ways for users to discover content which it will do by modifying the way Search and Explore looks and also add in a bunch of other elements in the app to bring more interesting stories. The redesign will see major updates to Twitter’s Explore feed which now shows curated feeds to news stories and live events.
The main timeline will now greet you with what’s “happening now” that delivers the breaking news at the top of the feed as was tested before with sports news. The “happening now” tab will be coupled up with a “personalized news” section that pops up a separate feed about a particular event with liked photos, videos, and tweets from other users.
Explore now gets topic tabs which allow users easier to navigate instead of the format based section. Twitter says that search results starting from today will show a highlights row below the search bar which will display a stack of thumbnails of game scores, videos, and other stories. Clicking these highlight thumbnails will lead you to individual threads and conversations happening over a certain topic, which will again be personalized to your tastes.
Twitter Moments is getting an overhaul in itself as the horizontal scroll of major stories is now being replaced by a vertically scrolling feed. Twitter says the vertical scrolling not only matches the way users use their timeline but also gathers more user engagement when the feature was tested earlier. Moments will also include multiple timelines for separate topics which will be displayed under “all the best Tweets surrounding a story”.
In the weeks to follow, Twitter will roll out push notifications for news stories that are deemed right according to your interests. The social media platform will be hosting a World Cup page within its app on Android and iOS which will be rolled out in over 10 languages and this will be companied by individual pages for every match that follows during the course of the World Cup.