Twitter’s New Feature Is Making Conversations More Friendly

Dhir Acharya - Jan 11, 2019

At CES 2019, Twitter said it will test a new feature on some users with the aim to increase interaction and make conversations easier.

Last year, Twitter said it had plans to launch new features to improve the interaction among users on its platform. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, also claimed to make public conversation healthier. Now, Twitter will conduct the former plan.

At the Consumer Electric Show 2019 (CES 2019), Twitter representatives said that in the coming weeks, the company will test the new features on some users. Among those, one feature is quite similar to the status indicator on the chat tool of Facebook’s website, which means users can see if a friend is currently online or not, or how long have they gone offline. With this feature, the social platform wants to make it easier for users to begin a conversation, knowing whether or not they should expect an immediate response.

Another feature to be launched soon is “icebreakers”. Specifically, it’s kind of prewritten messages which people can change and then use to start a conversation with a stranger. Last year, the Verge reported about this feature, say it may look like in the following photo.

It’s obvious that Twitter is thinking about letting users pin this ice breaking message to the head of their profile page. This way, users can start chatting with a familiar topic, generating a more natural conversation rather than struggling to find something to say to a new friend.

At least, Twitter seems to be spending efforts to improve its platform’s image, making it less frightening. And hopefully, these kinds of changes that enhance conversations can help the company cope with its problem of harassment and toxicity.

Founded on March 21, 2006, Twitter is an almost 13-year-old American online news and social networking service. On this social platform, users can post as well as interact through messages, accurately called ‘tweets.’ Initially, the platform limited tweets to only 140 characters, but it doubled that in November 2017. After registering an account, users can read, like, post and retweet tweets (which is like replying to a comment on Facebook).