In what could be one of Twitter’s most significant changes since doubling the character limit from 140 to 280 characters, the company is preparing to launch a new feature that would support live publishing of long-form content on its platform. With Twitter Notes, as the upcoming feature is called, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers after publication.
Update: Twitter announced on June 22, 2022 that it was merging its newsletter subscriptions into @TwitterWrite, a brand she’s using to encompass her long-running writing endeavors, including Notes and newsletters. The company tweeted that it would test allowing users to “tweet longer.” The image he posted also shows the Twitter Notes feature in action. Twitter had declined to comment on this on June 21, 2022 when we published it. Really, right? 🙂
We understand, the feature is being tested with select users before an upcoming public launch. (Twitter initially declined to comment, but said it would share updates about the feature “soon.” As it turns out, it announced function the day after our publication.)
If widely adopted, Twitter Notes could potentially change the way some people use the social media platform to share their deepest thoughts and ideas.
Today, it is common for users to create numbered threads on Twitter to link a series of tweets together as a storytelling tool or when explaining a topic that extends beyond the character count supported by Twitter. As a result of this user activity, Twitter officially embraced threads in 2017 with the launch of a new Twitter compositor screen that made multi-tweet posts — or Twitter storms, as they’re also known — easier to create. and published. At the time, there were hundreds of thousands of threads posted every day, the company had said. That number has likely increased since then.
But while Twitter threads encourage engagement as users click to expand tweets and related replies, they can also be a bit difficult to read – especially for longer content. This has created useful robots, like the Thread Reader app, which turn these tweetstorms into links where individual thread posts are formatted as an article for the sake of readability. These days, you’ll often see users asking for bot help in thread replies while tweeting “Moving the @threadreader app.”
Beyond the threads, users have also worked around Twitter’s character count limitations by writing long content in the Notes app on their smartphone, then posting a screenshot of their message. This works for quickly sending a message to a large audience, but it doesn’t benefit Twitter since the text on the screenshot isn’t searchable and hashtags aren’t clickable like text posted natively on the platform would be.
Twitter Notes could potentially provide an alternative to both problems by allowing users to write long articles directly on Twitter itself. This allows users to share their thoughts, as before, while still being able to take advantage of the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting on the platform. Like tweets, Notes would have their own link and could be posted, retweeted, DMed, liked and bookmarked.
The feature was seen in testing earlier this year by app researchers, including Jane Manchun Wong and others. Originally, Notes was called “Twitter Article,” the researchers found.
IN Images Wong posted in May, the feature offered formatting tools in a bar at the top of the screen similar to those you’d find in blogging software—like options for bolding text, adding italics or bullets, inserting ordered lists, adding of links, changing style, embedding media and embedded articles, track word count and more. Users can also add either a GIF, a video or up to four photos to their article, as well as include embedded tweets either through their URLs or bookmarks, the screenshots showed.
Wong noted that there was also a “Focus Mode” that would expand the article to a full-screen view and hide Twitter’s sidebars. She said the feature looked pretty polished, suggesting it may be close to launch.
In a similar series images shared by app researcher Nima Owji this April, the feature appeared to support saving articles as drafts and an interface to access both draft and published content.
When publishing a Note on Twitter, Owji found that users could check or uncheck boxes to automatically tweet the article to their feed, their Twitter circle, or their communities, as well as copy the article’s URL to shared elsewhere – like on another website or in an email, for example.
In the current version, now called Notes, the feature will be accessible from user profiles directly to the right of the “Tweets & Replies” link and before “Media,” the app’s researchers said.
Mobile product intelligence firm Watchful.ai was also able to confirm the development of Twitter Notes, which it found ready for launch in the latest version of the Twitter app. The firm also confirmed that the feature was located next to Tweets & replies, giving it a prominent place on users’ profiles.
While this link allows users to view an account’s published Notes, those who want to write new Notes can do so via a link added to Twitter’s main navigation. During the tests, Owji discovered that Twitter had been experimenting with this app icon, which at one point was relabeled as “Write” in the left column on Twitter’s web app, just below Twitter Blue.
Interestingly, this is the place Newsletters has retained following Twitter’s acquisition of Revue — a choice that points to an attempt to merge Twitter’s two long-standing writing products, Notes and Newsletters. (Update: Twitter has now officially confirmed this.)
The introduction of Twitter Notes may present some competition to long-form blogging platforms like WordPress or Medium — the latter incidentally developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. It can be especially useful for those users who rarely publish long article content and don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining their blog or website. If it also integrates with newspapers, it could also compete with popular newsletter platforms like Substack, whose authors often promote their subscriptions via Twitter.
That said, Twitter Notes may have some challenges ahead. As Facebook previously demonstrated, blogging efforts on the platform by social media companies don’t always go as expected. Facebook had tried to compete in this area when, in 2006, it launched a bare-bones blogging feature (also called Notes) to give users a way to post long-form text that wouldn’t fit in a facebook status update. The feature was then part of Facebook’s larger strategy to pursue original content, but it never became a popular publishing platform. Facebook quietly shut down Notes in October 2020. These days, Facebook is following Substack with its newsletter platform Buletin.
But users may be hesitant to publish on a social platform where business objectives are constantly changing, rather than a site that is more dedicated to publishing and sharing long-form content.
Similarly, Twitter will need to be able to convince users that its long-term publishing tool is something it’s committed to as opposed to one of its many experiments that could fall apart if it fails to catch on. attraction
Additionally, Twitter’s entire product initiative strategy is in flux as the company awaits the completion of Elon Musk’s acquisition. Musk has said he wants to be involved in Twitter’s product and has previously emphasized that his priorities were to grow Twitter’s revenue and user base while eliminating bots. A Bloomberg report also indicated that Twitter has pulled resources from some of its long-term projects such as Spaces, Communities and Newsletters ahead of Musk’s arrival.
Twitter is expected to launch Twitter Notes in the coming weeks, we understand — unless, of course, internal Twitter turmoil prevents it.
Update, June 22, 2022: Twitter officially confirmed feature a day after we published this post. The company is using Twitter Write as its brand, and the link to create new Twitter Notes is also named Write. But Twitter Notes is the name of the feature as shown in the image tweeted. He also confirmed the merger of Revue and the new long-form writing feature, as we had previously reported.
