Twitter announced Tuesday that it’s discontinuing CoTweeting, a function that allow two customers co-author a tweet. The corporate mentioned that the function will instantly stop to exist. Customers will have the ability to view the set of co-tweets for a month. After that, they are going to be mechanically transformed to retweets on the co-author’s profile.
“For the final a number of months we’ve been testing a brand new technique to Tweet collectively utilizing CoTweets. We’re unhappy to say that the present experiment is coming to an finish,” the corporate mentioned on the support page for CoTweets.
Twitter started testing CoTweets last July, saying it needed to find out how folks use this function to “strengthen their collaborations with different accounts.”
There would possibly nonetheless be some hope for the function to return again in one other type. “We’re nonetheless searching for methods to implement this function transferring ahead,” Twitter mentioned.
Whereas Twitter’s official reasoning behind shutting this function down was generic, in a tweet Elon Musk said that the social community took the step “to give attention to enabling writers so as to add essays as attachments to tweets.” It’s not instantly clear why it was a hindrance to writing.
Musk additionally added that subsequent week, the social community is launching a beta model of its new Superfollows program, which is able to supposedly assist creators publish instantly on the platform and receives a commission for it.
Earlier than Musk’s tenure at Twitter, the corporate had launched a long-form writing program referred to as Twitter Notes. Nevertheless it was instantly axed underneath the brand new administration. Over the previous few months, Musk has hinted about introducing long text attachments.
In December, Twitter designer Andrea Conway additionally posted some ideas to point how lengthy textual content would possibly look on the platform.
In January, app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi posted a video displaying that Twitter would possibly curtail lengthy posts at 280 characters with a “present extra…” button on the finish. If customers click on on it, the publish will increase to indicate the total textual content. Nevertheless, there isn’t a affirmation that Twitter will follow this implementation.
General, CoTweet’s demise shouldn’t be totally stunning. Musk & co. have slashed initiatives and options like ad-free articles, Twitter Notes, Twitter Toolbox for developers, Twitter Tiles (a new version of Twitter media cards) and, very recently, third-party Twitter clients.
