4 Changes Coming Soon To Twitter

Twitter is one of the largest and most popular social networks in the world. Its unfiltered, constantly updating timeline of short 140 character messages has proved to be successful in a space filled with media-rich, visual experiences. Despite this, Twitter, now a publicly traded company, is looking for a way to broaden its appeal and establish a way of generating profits without annoying its pre-existing users. Read below our list of 4 changes coming soon to Twitter which seek to achieve just this…

1. Improved Direct Messaging

One of the major reasons why Twitter currently does not have the level of engagement that rivals like Facebook or WeChat have is due to poor direct messaging (DM) functionality. It has been reported that Twitter is looking for ways to improve its DM service, making it easier to run alongside the standard Twitter news feed, as well as within dedicated apps.

 Image: © 2014 Soundcloud

2. Audio Playback & Purchasing

The last few months have seen a slow roll out of Twitter’s expansion into e-commerce. As part of this, the site wishes to become a new place for users to discover and buy music. To achieve this, they plan to enable to method of embedding music within tweets, and then accompanying this with an option to directly buy the track from within the site.

3. Unfollowed Tweets

Probably the most controversial change coming to Twitter is the decision to begin including unfollowed tweets within a user’s news feed. Twitter would theoretically assess what kind of content interests a user based on their profile information and the people they follow, and then include some tweets which they may find interesting from people they don’t yet follow.

Image: © 2014 Twitter

4. Topic Filtering

One of the biggest gripes which Twitter users have with its service is the amount of useless information in their news feeds. In order to fix this, Twitter is planning to automatically categorise tweets based on their content. With this information, a user will be able to decide whether they want to see all tweets from this user, or only tweets from them which relate to a certain topic of interest.