Little changes can make a difference.
For instance, Twitter’s decision to switch a star for a heart as its “Favorite” button increased use of the button by as much as 27.82 percent. And it’s clear that despite Wall St. demanding that site grow faster and be easier for new users to grasp to have some hope of keeping up with competitors like Facebook and Snapchat, the site is still sweating the small stuff.
Here are the four changes to the service announced this week:
- Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
- Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words!
- Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
- Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
These tweaks are in line with Twitter’s tradition of paying attention to how people use the site and make it easier for them to do what early adopters are already doing. That’s how we got hashtags, retweet buttons and @ replies.
Now you’ll be able to tweet a bit longer messages, something people do now with screenshots of text, and have more public conversations, something people do now by putting a “.” before someone’s @username so their whole feed sees the conversation not just people who happen to follow you and the user you’re conversing with.
Cool. These are useful little nudges that will keep people who already love the site engaged — even though they may have some ugly unforeseen consequences.
But will they transform Twitter and spark a new wave of growth? Not likely.
What would without alienating the hundreds of millions of loyal users? Tough question and we’d like to know what you think.
[polldaddy poll=9429603]
Cheers,
Jason
[Image by dominiccampbell | Flickr]
Categories